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That's a shame, but if I remember she'd had a couple of injuries? She seemed to have found a bit of a niche over at Hitec but I guess this season with everything as it is might have forced a bit of a reappraisal and if she felt she wasn't going to get to the next level and the new generation were going to mean that she missed her time to make that step up, it's fair. A shame though.Lucy Van De Haar (nee Garner) has announced her retirement at the age of 25. She was, literally, a poster girl round here a few years ago. Featuring in promotional material in schools and nurseries, trying to inspire girls to take up cycling. Twice World Junior Champion, she never really carried that success through to the pro ranks unfortunately
Hard to say, it's still very early days.Do you know if that's acquiring some of the old Virtu apparatus, or if it signals the death knell for Hitec? Or are they going to acquire Hitec? It'd really suck to lose them but the team has been pulled from pillar to post to stay alive in recent years and obviously their main source of UCI points lately was Lucy Garner-van der Haar who's just retired.
Interestingly, the former is going ahead, while the men's race has been cancelled.
Yea but the problem with that is that this is also the event where the men got a proper Olympic legacy race, the women got a city centre hour-long crit to give Joe Public the chance to ride the real course. I'd assume that the sportive is the main money spinner for them, so if they could only get road closures agreed for one day instead of two, they'd prefer to go with the sportive and the women's race over the men's because of that. So it's a mixed blessing really, the women's race got to survive because the women weren't given a proper race in the first place.I actually like this sort of development. Where, if an organiser runs both a mens' and a womens' edition of a race, but find themselves in a situation where they can only hold one; they choose to keep the womens' race. The same thing with Colorado (except they had to completely cancel it this year.)
the women got a city centre hour-long crit to give Joe Public the chance to ride the real course.
Hmmm... that makes me think; who's to say "Jane Public" can't ride the sportive? Just imagine if a whole bunch of female riders - and I guess there'd not really be anything stopping the pros from riding - signed up for the sportive.
For any pro to ride it, you'd need them to actually live there in the first place and not have something else they're already doing. You aren't going to get riders from outside of London showing up for it if they aren't racing. The women who are there to race wouldn't be riding it due to their own race that same day and likely an overlapping time as well.
Oh, I thought it was on different days! Bummer... because if it had been the "official" Ride LondonClasique one day, and then the sportive the next, it could have been rather cool if - perhaps not all, but several of - the pros just rolled up to the start like; "Hey guys. Nice warm-up race yesterday; time to ride."