Rain, Cobbles, and only 38 riders

The lap had about 8,5 km and we obviously hadn’t seen any of it before the actual race...which resulted in some rather weird situations.

It started to rain just before the start (which really was my moms fault, she talked too much about it) and all of us 38 riders were drenched before the race had even started.

The girls went off like someone was chasing them, however they did slow down for the turns...but only for the (rather slippery) turns.

Already in the first lap, the little bunch was split into several groups, and since I didn’t have a good position on the start-line to begin with, I was rather far behind. Right after the second (straight!) cobbles part, a rider fell in front of me, I managed to avoid her but lost even more time. My mother saw the crash happen, so she waited for me (she didn’t want to take risks either) and we tried to get back into the group in front of us. Eventually, some riders caught up with us, some were dropped again, but in the last laps, we came back to the group. My mom finished 2nd in sprint, I did 4th, so we ended up 21th and 23th out of 28 riders.

There had been a lot of crashes, 10 riders didn’t make it into the classification...so really, I was just glad that neither my mother nor I did crash. Honestly, I’ve never been more thankful that someone taught me how to do take bends correctly...

Result of the race