Team News – WNT’s April Review

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Women’s cycling team, WNT look back at April and their first podium in a National Series event

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Team News – WNT’s April Racing
The team’s first official race of the year was the Dave Peck Memorial road race, a round of the national team series. Due to injury Sophie Lankford didn’t start and neither did Hannah Walker as she was recovering from donating bone marrow to her brother.

The team headed to the start line light on numbers. From here things didn’t really improve, with unavoidable punctures and crashes, we didn’t come away from the race with the results the team had hoped for despite Jo Tindley looking on great form that day.

The following weekend, we had two riders contesting their combined regional road race championships and with the help of an additional team mate, Becca Carter, did a stirling job working for Lydia Boylan to take the overall victory and the East Midlands title. Rose Osborne come in third taking the Central championship. As a team we were delighted to come away with two divisional champions.

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Onto the Tour of the Reservoir which was the opening round of the Women’s National Road Race Series. Hannah was back with the team although not fully recovered yet but now Jo was missing with a broken ankle.

Stage one was a 3.6km loop consisting of 10 laps the pace was fast from the start, by the finish a breakaway of two riders, Dani King and Katie Archibald contested the sprint for first with a chasing group containing Charline Joiner, 1:26 back and battling for the final place on the podium. Charline won the bunch sprint and TeamWNT’s first national podium!

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(Podium – Dani King, Katie Archibald, Charline Joiner.)

The follow day’s stage two saw the peloton facing a very hilly 88km in the Northumberland countryside. The race began under sunny skies but soon took a turn for the worse by the last lap snow was settling. From the start, as with the previous day, the pace was fast and the large field of riders splintered into several groups with Charline and Lydia managing to stay at the sharp end.

Both riders rode fantastically in horrendous conditions finishing 10th and 12th respectively and giving Charline 6th on the overall classification. A great result after two hard days of racing.

As the women’s national road race series moved onto the Chesire classic, so did the Team, entering a team of six riders, Charline, Hannah, Becca, Rose, Brit Tate, and Sam Burman who lined up in a quality field including Laura Trott wearing her national champions jersey, proving the popularity of this classic event which saw the racers complete 12 laps of 7.7km circuit with the finish line half way up the famous ‘cliff’ climb.

The race was won with a solo breakaway for Dame Sarah Story. TeamWNT had three riders left to contest the bunch sprint where Charline took 7th place. Charline’s consistent top ten placings over the first two rounds has left her 2nd in the overall standings for the national road series, just one point off the current leader Dani King. The team will be working hard to keep Charline up there in the overall for the rest of the season!

Speaking of the teams performance in their first month of competition team manager Marcus said “Despite a few injuries and other small problems it’s been a great start to the year, especially at the level we’ve stepped up to, the whole team are learning so much at each event and team spirit just keeps building.”

TeamWNT will be sending a team to the tour of Yorkshire event this coming weekend.

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