Rosa Klöser has claimed the win on the Unbound Gravel 200 professional ladies’s race, sprinting to victory on the gruelling professional ladies’s race to take probably the most prestigious title within the gravel world.
The 203 mile (327 km) race with 11,850 toes (3,612m) of climbing ended with a lead group of 9 heading into the ultimate mile and whereas it broke up a bit of within the technical run in, it ended with a dash battle for the rostrum placings.
Klöser bought the hole on the sprint to the end line in Emporia, Kansas, crossing forward of Geerike Schreurs (SD Worx-ProTime) who took out second place and in third it was Paige Onweller (Trek-Drftlss).
Klöser, who has solely been racing bikes for 2 and a half years, discovered herself within the mixture of the ladies’s greatest riders on the world’s greatest stage for gravel racing with 54 miles to go. However after the second checkpoint at Council Grove, she crashed after which misplaced extra time when she couldn’t get her Co2 to work with a flat tyre.
“I instructed myself I’m going to die attempting to shut this hole again, and I made it. I solely misplaced round two minutes to the lead ladies. I closed the hole and was fairly cooked,” the 27-year-old Dane mentioned on the end.
“Ultimately I knew that I had a fairly OK dash after a protracted time out, I’m positively not a pure sprinter,” she laughed. “Within the last nook, I used to be in fairly an OK place after which I saved going. I might inform nobody was coming shut once I was within the entrance after which I gained!”
It was a debut at Unbound Gravel 200 for each Klöser and runner-up Schreurs, and each are comparatively new to gravel racing.
“Nobody actually is aware of me. Truly I’m nonetheless a full-time PhD [student] and do biking, or skilled racing, half time. It’s been going fairly nicely,” mentioned Klöser, who earlier than Unbound had been in a podium common in quite a few UCI Gravel World Sequence rounds and in addition got here third on the Traka 200 final month. “And I believe an Unbound victory is wonderful. I nonetheless don’t consider it. It’s slowly starting to sink in.”
The 2024 Unbound was a quick version of the race on the north course, because the roads dried out so there was little to be seen of the dreaded peanut butter mud that riders had been coming throughout in reconnaissance rides, with Klöser ending with a time of 10:26:02.
Final yr’s solo winner Carolin Schiff (Canyon CLLCTV) got here sixth within the dash end whereas 2022 winner and 2023 runner-up Sofia Gomez-Villafañe (Specialised) came visiting the road in fifteenth place, 12:28 again from the winner.
Villafañe mentioned she didn’t get to benefit from the ladies’s race very a lot, which noticed no males among the many important contenders, due to two flat tyres and a mechanical, however merely said, ‘that’s bike racing’.
