Following Lizzie Armitstead’s success on Wednesday, Hannah Barnes gave the home nation a second stage win in the Aviva Women’s Tour on Sunday, outsprinting Thursday’s winner Jolien D’Hoore in Hemel Hempstead, with the overall title going to Germany’s Lisa Brennauer who had taken the lead after her stage win on Saturday in Stevenage.
The organisers had promised that the final 103km outing through the Chilterns would tear the field asunder, with a plethora of steep ascents culminating in Tom’s Hill, a hairpinned monster through the beech woods above the picture-postcard village of Aldbury, a location for dramas as diverse as Inspector Morse, The Avengers and Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason.
Instead, the day’s racing followed a similar script to many of the previous nine stages of this year’s and last year’s Women’s Tours, with splits in the peloton and a plucky escape caught tantalisingly close to the finish line – on Sunday it was the turn of France’s Audrey Cordon and Claudia Lichtenberger, who lasted out until the final kilometre – before a mass sprint decided matters. Brennauer ran in fourth to seal her second stage race win of the season.
In taking the most important win of her career, Barnes sealed the transition the former British under-14 omnium champion from being the queen of British town centre racing – she was involved in a diverting dispute with Olympic champion Laura Trott over victory in the London Nocturne in 2013 – into an all-round athlete who can use her speed to good advantage at the end of demanding road races.
“I’ve been focusing on my climbing quite a lot this winter and I just made sure I was in a good position going into the bottom of the climbs,” said the 22-year-old, who began her racing with Buckinghamshire’s Team Keyne and has ridden since 2014 for the US-based United Health Care squad.
“I always made sure I was on the right side of the split. [The peloton] spilt twice but it came back together, but I always knew it was going to be hard around here. It is the Chilterns so I knew what sort of climbs to expect. It wasn’t the Alps but I knew it was going to be four- or five-minute efforts as hard as I could.”
As might be expected in Hemel Hempstead – the home of one of the most notorious gyratory systems in the UK, the Magic Roundabout – the run-in to the finish on Leighton Buzzard Road was tricky, according to Barnes. “It was just crazy, really difficult. There were quite a few roundabouts and traffic islands that we all had to contend with. I got boxed with about 300 metres to go but thankfully it opened up for me and I was able to open up my sprint.” But the time bonus for her victory sealed fifth place overall, along with the best young rider’s jersey and best Briton award.
A few metres behind Barnes in the lead group was Brennauer, the reigning world time-trial champion, who had finished second on day one in Aldeburgh, then taken the race lead on day two after Armitstead departed from the race after her stage one crash. The 27-year-old German, a regular medallist on the track and a prolific winner on the road, relinquished the race leader’s jersey to Armitstead’s Boels-Dolmans team-mate Christine Majerus, but made up for it on a rainy Saturday in Stevenage.
“The first day I wore [the jersey] it felt weird as I hadn’t been the winner on the first stage,” she said. “I worked hard yesterday to fight back for it and the team have been working so hard for me all week so I just wanted to get to the point that I could give them back for all their hard work. It was a tough stage with all the hills and a lot of hard attacks going on so they brought me back so we could take the yellow jersey.”
