Newly-crowned elite women’s UCI Cyclo-cross World Champion Lucinda Brand captured a second rainbow stripes jersey and this time in front of a home crowd in the Netherlands on Saturday, but it was not without drama. The Dutch rider crashed while in a clear lead allowing rival Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado back to her wheel.
“It was OK. It was more that I had to stay calm," Brand said. "To see a little bit how Ceylin [del Carmen Alvarado] was riding and to see when and how to put the pressure on again. I knew also that if she can come back in a race, she's really hard to drop off again, especially on explosive course like this.
“In the end I was just a bit strong, which helped me to push hard for a full lap. My strength is that the whole race is hard, not when it’s on and off the whole time."
Talking about her first attack on the third lap, Brand added, “I wanted to see what would happen if I could ride on the front. Puck [Pieterse] crashed quite hard and it changed the race straight away.
“I had a good flow, a bit too good and I started to pedal a bit too early on some points which caused me to crash. I was a bit mad with myself. That gave Ceylin the opportunity to come back for free, but the race was hard enough to be able to drop her again.”
Alvarado finished 27 second behind Brand for the silver medal, while Puck Pieterse took the bronze. The victory caps a stellar year for the 36-year-old Brand, who has 19 cyclo-cross wins from 24 starts and the World Cup overall series lead.
However, it also came during a winter when her mother died, shortly before an emotional win at the Cyclo-cross World Cup Terralba. She spoke about the mental strength which has seen her through this difficult period, and her long career.
“I think I'm quite good in just focusing on that little thing that I'm doing at the that right moment,” she said. “So I'm not really distraught from the things that happen around me.
“Sometimes it's a weakness, of course, in life to move on all the time and not to think too much about what happened, but in this case, I think it's a strength for me. So I took it with two hands."
Combining cyclo-cross and road racing calendars the Lidl-Trek and Baloise Verzekeringen-Het Poetsbureau Lions, her career spans 19 years from her first junior appearance at the Dutch National Championship in 2007.
Brand’s early career was dominated by road racing and a handful of cyclo-cross events in the winter months. During her lengthy road career Brand has won three stages of the Giro d'Italia Internazionale Femminile, won the Internationale LOTTO Thüringen Ladies Tour and Tour de Suisse Women.
It was only in 2016-2017 that the Dutch woman rode a full cyclo-cross calendar, winning her first race and culminating in a fourth place finish the Cyclo-cross World Championships in Bieles. The Baloise Verzekeringen-Het Poetsbureau Lions rider now has 87 wins to her name and two world titles.
Absent from today's competition was three-time elite women's 'cross world champion and compatriot Fem Van Empel, who put her career on hold at the age of 23. Following her victory Saturday, Brand talked about the pressure being put onto young athletes at a young age.
“I think the mental aspect, which is really hard for riders, also comes with every little small detail that the riders feels to have the need to control," she said.
“Talking about food, rest, not really having social life because maybe it costs too much energy or being afraid to get ill in the wrong moment.
“That is a lot of pressure, especially when you're already really good at a young age, so you don't really have the time to grow into that. I think because I had time to grow into it, I'm a bit more relaxed with many of those things.
“Of course, everybody has their difficult moments. Maybe on some moments in my career it will not benefit me, but I'm not going to weigh my food every time.
“I think that helps me a lot to just stay calm and enjoy it and see the beauty of what we can do," she added.
"If you are weighing your food, working out calories and carbs then this is not so easy, because you cannot delete it [from your mind] also in the days that you don't need to think about it.
“I think this is the most difficult part of cycling nowadays. You can't really get around it because, when you put [out] a lot of watts, with not so much kilograms, you just have the result of being faster than another.”
Brand will now turn her hand to helping her Lidl-Trek road teammates at Strade Bianche Donne on March 7, before targeting Paris-Roubaix Femmes and Ronde van Vlaanderen in the spring.
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