The Fastest Rider in the Race Didn't Win It

Four stages out of five, and still not enough

The Lloyds Tour of Britain Women ran five stages from August 19 to 23, and by the finish in Royal Leamington Spa, Lorena Wiebes had won four of them: stages 1, 2, 4, and 5, a sprint record for the race (British Cycling). She was, by a wide margin, the strongest rider in the field on the metric that decided most of the week. She did not win the race.

Kim Le Court-Pienaar did, by 24 seconds over Liane Lippert in the final general classification. She won exactly one stage. It was her first overall stage-race victory and, by most reporting, the first time a rider from Africa has won this event (Cyclingnews). Four wins to one, and the rider with one wins the thing that actually gets remembered.

That is not an upset in the usual sense. Nobody choked, nothing was fluky, and Wiebes's team wasn't racing to lose. It is what happens when a race asks two genuinely different questions on five different days, and the rider who answers one of them best isn't the same rider who answers the other one at all.

What actually happened on the Great Orme

Stage 3 ran 104.7 kilometers from Mold to the top of the Great Orme in Llandudno, finishing on a 2.5-kilometer climb averaging 6.1 percent, with the final 1.5 kilometers tipping past 7 (ProCyclingUK). Le Court-Pienaar attacked roughly 2 kilometers out, right at the base of the steepest section, and rode the rest of it alone. She crossed the line in 2:46:10. Lippert was 13 seconds back.

Wiebes cracked from the front group on the climb and finished 10th, 37 seconds down. She'd already banked two stage wins by then and would go on to win two more, so this was hardly a disaster for her week. But it cost her the jersey and, as it turned out, the race: a gap that never opened again on the flat, sprint-friendly stages that followed, because those stages don't hand back time, they just confirm who already has it.

Here's the part worth sitting with: a 2.5-kilometer climb at 6 to 7 percent, after 100-plus kilometers and two days of racing, is not an unusually hard demand for a professional women's peloton. It's a normal hard day. It just happens to ask for a completely different engine than four bunch sprints do. Sprinting is a handful of seconds of the highest power a rider can produce, built on top of whatever fitness got her to the final corner intact. The Great Orme asked for eight or nine minutes of sustained, near-threshold power on tired legs, with nowhere to hide and no leadout to finish the job. Those are not the same sport wearing the same jersey.

Two different questions, and only one answer that mattered

Four of five stages on this route asked "who can produce the most power in the final 200 meters." Wiebes answered that question better than anyone in the field, four separate times. One stage asked "who can hold threshold power uphill with three race days already in her legs." She had a good answer, just not the best one, and it only had to happen once to decide the overall.

This is the trap underneath a lot of well-trained athletes' seasons, not just professional ones: you get very good at the question you already like answering, because it's the one you can train for without discomfort, measure without ambiguity, and see improve without much doubt. FTP tests are a clean number. A five-second power PR is a clean number. Whether you can hold zone 3 on a climb that shows up 90 minutes into a group ride you don't control is a much messier thing to train for on purpose, so a lot of athletes just don't, and then discover the gap on the one day their goal actually asks the harder question.

The same trap outside professional racing

You don't need a general classification to feel this. If your goal is a century with one legitimately hard climb near the mile-70 mark, or a Saturday group ride that reliably splits on the same hill every single week, the mismatch can sit quietly in your training for months. You can raise your FTP all winter, feel genuinely fitter on the flat group rides, and still get shelled on the exact climb your event is built around, because a higher number on a flat 20-minute test doesn't automatically mean you can produce that power after 70 miles and on a grade that's steeper than your test hill.

This is the honest version of what a coach means when someone's FTP goes up but their event result doesn't follow: the number moved, the limiter didn't. Maybe the real gap was never peak threshold power at all, it was durability on tired legs, or pacing discipline, or the specific gradient your legs haven't practiced. In the app, this is the whole reason a session on your plan tells you what it's actually building toward and how it ties to your goal, rather than just handing you an interval set: a threshold block only closes the right gap if it's the gap your event is going to open.

It cuts the other direction too. If your goal has no climb in it at all, chasing sustained power you'll never need is its own version of the same mistake. Specificity isn't "train harder," it's "train the thing the day is actually going to ask you."

Finding your own Great Orme

The practical move is almost embarrassingly simple, and almost nobody does it early enough: before you build a block, write down, specifically, what your goal is going to demand on its hardest moment. Not "be fitter." The actual shape of the effort: how long, how steep, how deep into the day it arrives, on what kind of legs.

Your own power file is a decent place to check whether your training already matches that shape. Training Signals works out your best 1, 5, 20, and 60-minute power on every ride that has the data to support it, computed from the ride's own second-by-second file rather than an average, so you can see your actual curve rather than guess at it. A rider whose 5-minute number towers over her 60-minute number relative to her FTP is built more like a sprinter; one whose numbers sit closer together is built more like a diesel. Neither shape is wrong. The question is only whether it matches what your goal is going to ask of you, and if it doesn't, that's the gap to close, not the number that's already easy to move.

If your goal doesn't have a single number attached at all, the same logic still applies. The general-fitness model in the app isn't a watered-down version of a race plan; it optimizes for consistency and how training feels rather than peak output on a specific day, because that's genuinely a different goal with a different right answer, not a lesser one.

Building the missing quality without giving up your strength

None of this means Wiebes should stop being a sprinter, and it doesn't mean you should abandon whatever you're already good at either. It means adding the complementary quality alongside it, not instead of it. For a rider whose limiter is sustained power on tired legs, that usually looks like tempo and threshold work placed deliberately late in longer rides, when the legs are already carrying some fatigue, rather than only ever tested fresh on a Tuesday evening. Sprint work stays in the plan. It just stops being the only thing the plan trains.

Where this reasoning has limits

One race is one race. Wiebes's team may well have been racing purely for stage wins and sprint-classification points, not the overall, in which case there's no mismatch to explain at all, just a different objective executed well. Team tactics, race radios, and who marks whom on a given day shape outcomes at least as much as raw physiology does, and nothing about a single five-day stage race proves a general law about training. Treat the pattern here as a useful way to look at your own training, not as evidence about what happened inside a professional team car that none of us were in.

The takeaway

Before your next block starts, write down what your goal's hardest moment actually looks like, then look honestly at whether this week's training answers that question or just the one you already enjoy answering. Wiebes will very likely win more stages than anyone at the next race she enters. The Tour of Britain Women wasn't decided by who could do that. It was decided by 2.5 kilometers most of the field only had to survive once.