Ally Wollaston pips British teenager Cat Ferguson to Tour of Britain title
The teenage prodigy Cat Ferguson came within a hair's breadth of executing a memorable overall win in her debut Tour of Britain, but was outsprinted by her rival Ally Wollaston at the climax of the final stage in Glasgow.
The pair came into the final sprint tied on time, after Wollaston had erased the 19-year-old Ferguson's overall lead. Bonus seconds for third place in the final sprint, behind the stage winner, Lorena Wiebes, was enough for the New Zealander to snatch the overall win.
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'I was lucky that there were a lot of seconds up for grabs,' Wollaston, riding for FDJ-Suez, said.
Wiebes, SD Worx-Protime teammate to the absent defending champion, Lotte Kopecky, rescued her team's race with a peerless stage win. 'We've had some bad luck this week with crashes and lost GC hopes because of it,' Wiebes said, 'but wrapping up the week with a stage win feels great.'
Yet it was Wollaston's day and her turns of speed in the intermediate sprints chiselled relentlessly away at Ferguson's narrow lead until only a single second separated the pair in the overall standings.
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After beating Ferguson yet again, in the third sprint, Wollaston asserted herself in the final dash to the line to take the biggest win of her career.
'The plan was to get as many seconds as I could, and unfortunately Cat was on my wheel for every single one, so it really came down to the last sprint,' she said. 'There was definitely a moment where I thought, 'I just cannot do this today.' My teammates really helped me, and pulled me to the front for the final.'
The Aucklander's success came at Ferguson's expense and the teenager from Skipton crossed the finish line in tears as she realised she had lost the overall lead. 'I would have loved to have won. I am gutted, but she was the strongest today,' Ferguson, of the Movistar team, said.
'If you had told me at the beginning of the week that I'd be second, I would have been over the moon, so I can't be too disappointed.'
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Victory began to slip from Ferguson's grasp in the series of intermediate sprints centred on Glasgow Green, in which she and her Movistar team were consistently overpowered by Wollaston and her FDJ-Suez team.
A mid-race puncture also forced an unwelcome bike change and left Ferguson chasing the peloton on the fast circuit. 'It was eventful for sure,' Ferguson, who also won the points and best young rider classifications, said. 'There was always something going on during the intermediate sprints. I had a puncture, but I didn't want to change the bike, because I felt OK, [but] then it was slowly going down.'
Try as she might, the teenager was unable to prevent Wollaston's track racing experience from eroding the hard-fought gains made in Saturday's stage, through the rainswept hills west of Kelso.
In the final crucial sprint, Wollaston's team put her in a better position on the last bend. 'I got a bit chopped up on some corners and really that was it,' Ferguson said. 'Ally went away and I knew that was it.'
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But Ferguson, winner of the junior world road race and time trial titles last season, can take heart from a consistently strong performance throughout the four day race. The race's most dramatic moments came in the hills around Kelso in Saturday's attritional and rainswept 143.8-kilometre third stage. As others suffered, Ferguson flourished.
The stage, marked by two major crashes, proved catastrophic for the overnight race leader, Kristen Faulkner, who suffered a series of mishaps and finished more than three minutes behind Ferguson.
The 19-year-old, who had said 'I love it when it rains' following a win earlier this season, was true to her word on Saturday, showing true grit and bike handling skills, particularly on the greasy Kelso cobbles at the finish.
Ferguson described the torrid conditions around Kelso as 'really horrible,' but said 'the rain brings out the racer in me and gives me more adrenaline'.
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Meanwhile, as Ferguson pondered what might have been, a tearful Lizzie Deignan rolled to a halt in Glasgow, after completing her final day of racing on British roads.
Describing her feelings as 'very close to the surface', Deignan, who retires at the end of this season, said her final day racing in Britain was 'emotional.' The 36 old described the Glasgow stage as 'fast and technical and scary, but really fun as well'.
'The crowd were amazing and the team committed 100%,' she said. 'We were against all odds today, but we didn't give up.'
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