Newly crowned national time trial champion Georgia Williams added the New Zealand Road Race title to her collection today, becoming a dual national champion after a phenomenal solo victory in Napier.
Soloing to the jersey
Not wanting to take any risks with a sprint finish, the 24-year-old attacked and led solo into the final 40kilometres of the event and managed to increase her advantage over the reduced peloton by almost one minute each lap. Her dominating performance saw her finally finish five minutes ahead of the sprint for second place.
The breakaway
Two-riders, Ione Johnson and Kerry-Anna Page, animated first part of the 114km event, breaking away on the opening country lap and extending out to a four-minute advantage. However, as the duo were slowly reeled back towards the peloton as they entered the city circuits, Williams picked her moment, using the leaders as bait, and launched across and straight past the leaders as she barreled towards victory.
Doubling up
After taking confidence from claiming her first ever elite national title yesterday, Williams started the road race with a lot of determination to try and do ‘the double’ after previously finishing runner-up on three separate occasions. The Mitchelton-SCOTT rider clearly had the legs and was able to take a well deserved road race victory.
Georgia Williams:
“It’s awesome to win this title today and it is going to be really great to take the New Zealand jersey back to Europe.”
“I don’t think anybody was expecting me to go so early so I think I caught people off guard, but I didn’t expect to put so much time into the peloton.”
“I just put my head down and tried to keep going. I could feel the time trial effort in my legs a little bit but I was telling myself it was a good activation for today.
“It was really cool to see afterwards that my Mitchelton-SCOTT teammates were watching the race and supporting me, I was thinking of them out there today and I knew they would be proud and that put the pressure on me to win.”
