The women's bunch, now freed for a couple of weeks from World Tour commitments that lead to universal peaking, splits into a few different parts now.
Firstly, we have the Women's Tour of Yorkshire. A lot of the biggest teams, especially those based in the Low Countries, for which this is just a short trip across the North Sea, albeit several of them with odds-and-sods lineups, mixing a couple of elite stars with their younger prospect riders. However, one of the benefits of the Tour of Yorkshire is that the trend of men's cycling becoming shorter and more straightforward means that for once we are able to see races where the men and the women take on exactly the same course, with both stages being just over the 130km mark.
For interest, the men's stage was completed in 3 hours 9 minutes, the women's in 3 hours 35.
Anyway. Mitchelton-Scott are probably the star turns in this race, bringing both van Vleuten and Spratt, their two biggest stars, while other big teams go with one bonanza star and some other riders who, while strong, aren't necessarily their marquee names. Boels and CCC both come with five riders only, but led by van der Breggen and Vos respectively. Of course, any Boels-Dolmans lineup is dangerous, and van der Breggen, Buurman, Majerus, Dideriksen and Pieters is a lot of firepower that rather masks the low team numbers. Canyon leave all of their climbing hands behind and focus on the Barnes sisters on their home roads, with their other riders all being their youngest and least experienced riders. Trek have local girl Lizzie Deignan leading them (and British TV has Phil Deignan on commentary duties for the men's race, so there is that link, though he is handing over the reins to Lucy Martin and Dani Rowe for the women's event) but no Lepistö or Longo Borghini. Sunweb are without Rivera, Brand, van Dijk or Ensing, instead led by Mathiesen and Lippert. On the flip side, some smaller teams are going all out for this. WNT have entered Brennauer and both arms of their climbing side, Santesteban and Magnaldi; FDJ have Fahlin and Gillow on hand; Movistar have decided to bring their star climbers to this because of the Scarborough stage; while Alé Cipollini can compete in the sprint with Chloe Hosking and in the climbs with Soraya Paladin.
Most interesting among the smaller teams, both on paper and in practice, are Parkhotel Valkenburg in those so-bad-they're-good jerseys. With veteran help from Roxane Knetemann, they have two of the season's revelations at hand - tomorrow in the Scarborough stage, people will have their eyes on Demi Vollering after her stupendous Ardennes week, but before that we had a sprint today, and Lorena Wiebes, the junior phenom, made mincemenat of the field to show that her early season form and success at Gent-Wevelgem and de Panne was no fluke, beating a useful sprinting field including Majerus, Jackson, Fournier and Brennauer.
Elsewhere, we have the four-day Gracia-Orlová race in the eastern Czech Republic. A long standing women's race over hilly terrain, it includes five stages over four days, from Thursday to Sunday. Fewer big teams here, but a few worthwhile names in the national lineups. The star attraction was also the winner of the first stage, Marta Bastianelli of Virtu, who lost her World Cup overall lead in Liège-Bastogne-Liège but whose crazy good start to the season shows no sign of abating. The only other World Tour team on the startlist is BTC, but with Bujak and Nilsson they had a strong starting lineup at least. However, a fair few others in the national teams - Ann-Sophie Duyck of Parkhotel, and Kelly van den Steen and Julie van de Velde of Lotto for Belgium; Anna Plichta of Trek for Poland; Maria Novolodskaya of Cogeas for Russia; Omer Shapira and Roten Gafinovitz of Canyon-SRAM for Israel; Martina Ritter (ex-of Wiggle) for Austria; and emerging from the shadows, Hanna Solovey, now with the Ukrainian LVIV team, where she is the only recognizable name - unless you're really dedicated, in which case you may remember Valeriya Kononenko being at the Fanini team a few years ago (I didn't). I believe she's the sister of Mykhaylo.
Either way, stage 1 into Stramberk saw a few small groups formed by the complex finale, Bastianelli opening a couple of seconds in the run to the line ahead of Novolodskaya, Van de Velde and Pintar (Novolodskaya is only 19, I hope that she can follow in Chursina/Iakovenko's footsteps and move west before too much of the stigma of Russian/Ukrainian etc. cycling ends up on her and teams don't take a look - interestingly Zabelinskaya has now moved to represent Uzbekistan so will be seen less often in events like this), with Kirillova and teenage Frenchwoman Jade Wiel at +11", with further groups at +17", +25", +30" and +36". On day 2, Mieke Kröger continued Virtu's winning run with victory in the morning ITT over 13,5km, taking the victory ahead of Anna Plichta, with Canyon's Israeli duo also in the top 5. In fourth place, however, was Novolodskaya, and so the teenager inherited the race lead, finishing 30" quicker than Bastianelli and with Van de Velde and Pintar each either side of 40" from her time. Duyck was a surprisingly uncompetitive 15th at 1'11" here, and is normally a very good time triallist, so this suggests either a crash or a mechanical, unless she's maybe sick or something because you'd usually expect her to at least be in the mix for a podium in this field. She also lost a minute on the bunch in the flat stage in the afternoon so it suggests something is wrong. In the afternoon Rachel Neylan made it three wins out of three for Virtu, but despite Bastianelli's best efforts - she gained four seconds over the 60-strong péloton, which was led home by Polish track specialist Nikoł Płosaj - the World Tour team couldn't wrest control of the race from Novolodskaya's troops.
Finally, in North America, the Tour of the Gila is going on, with a fairly limited field - not many of the European péloton want to travel across so soon after the Ardennes, and are waiting for the Tour of California to do so, while TIBCO are starting one of their European jaunts, so some of their key riders are there - Alison Jackson, Shannon Malseed, Nina Kessler, Rozanne Slik and Lauren Stephens are all racing in Yorkshire. With Brodie Chapman and Lex Albrecht they still have some talent in the domestic races though, and among the key opposition in this mountainous race for them will be Rally - most notably through former Cylance rider Kristabel Doebel-Hickok, who is a more than capable climber, and young Canadian Sara Poidevin, who was top 10 in the Ardêche and California last year and finished 2nd in this race last year behind Katie Hall, who's now blown town to race in Europe. Kristin Armstrong's Twenty20 project has the likes of Chloe Dygert who has come from the track but seems to be talented enough to decide what she wants to do and then go out and do it, while there are some real blasts from the past here too - Veronica Léal Balderas, a 42-year-old Mexican who spent several years racing in Italy a decade ago, and 51-year-old Edwige Pitel, still going strong on a mercenary basis.