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Sandy Dujardin (TotalEnergies) took a massive sprint win from a small group at the Maryland Cycling Classic after an exciting circuit race around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
The Frenchman beat out Jonas Abrahamsen (Uno-X) and Marius Mayrhoffer (Tudor Pro Cycling) in the final sprint of seven riders.
The Maryland Cycling Classic was Dujardin’s second pro victory of his career, despite consistent results in mid-level UCI racing. As much as his win was as an result of his well timed sprint, it came after he played a flawless final after a group of seventeen elite riders weathered the chaos of the tight Baltimore circuit where a mid race rainstorm caused the race to blow apart.
Brandon McNulty (US National Team) was the most aggressive with a huge set of accelerations breaking the seventeen riders down to four, before splitting that group even further to just the American and Dujardin. On the last climb with just over 10km to go, McNulty gave it one last acceleration with the Frenchman on his wheel with the hopes of going solo to the finish.
Yet Dujardin was strong enough to stick to McNulty’s wheel and be patient enough to trust his sprint despite five riders coming back into the fold before the long flat drag race to the line.
“I am super proud of the win,” Dujardin said after the race. “We came all this way just to do the Maryland Cycling Classic so that’s a lot of travel for one day. We came with one goal to win so we are so happy.
“We had a lot of options with the riders we had left so we had lots of cards to play. We missed the first move but I was able to jump across on the climb. It was really tough because everyone had multiple riders in the break, but I was on my own so i had to cover everything on my own.”
“Jonas [Abrahamsen]was the fastest guy so I knew I had to follow him. SO when he went I jumped right on and I took it home.”
A race defined by a downpour
The men had six laps of the Baltimore city center loop, the same circuit the women took on in the morning, but the big change was the weather. While the race started on the same hot and humid conditions, the race devolved when a torrential downpour shattered the race just past halfway.
Oscar Sevilla (Team Medellin) and Fabian Weiss (Tudor Pro Cycling) were up the road from an early move and made the breakaway of the day on the second lap of the day. The two riders were able to get a gap of over five minuted to a peloton full of riders that seemed uninterested in chasing, but very keen on bridging to the leaders up front.
Ultimately, a group of eleven riders got away from the peloton, including the pre-race favorites Brandon McNulty and Neilson Powless (EF Education-EasyPost), both with teammates present among the strong counter attack.
The big change came a lap later when the rain started to fall and the conditions rapidly worsened to a fully fledged downpour. A small group with a few more favorites took the rain as an opportunity to jump across from the peloton, including Riley Sheehan (Israel Premier Tech), Jonas Abrahamsen (Uno-X), and Marijn van den Berg (EF Education-EasyPost), three riders who all excell in adverse conditions. Favorites who didn’t make up the front were Michael Matthews (Jayco-Alula) and Quinn Simmons (Lidl-Trek) who were both out of the action. Pair that with Lidl-Trek losing Mattias Skjelmose on the second lap and suddenly the American team was out of the action.
The rain stopped as quickly as it arrived and the seventeen survivors of the peloton who had been trickling up the road were set to decide the win, with attrition taking out riders one by one. One of those victims was Neilson Powless who flatted shortly after the cobbled section that followed the bell for the last lap. The change was so slow that Powless was forced to run with his bike to get up to his team car and change his bike.
The final moves began halfway through the final lap with four riders stealing off the front , driven by McNulty, Dujardin, Guillaume Bovin (Israel Premier Tech), and Marius Mayrhoffer (Tudor Pro Cycling). McNulty kicked again and Dujardan was the only one of the other attackers who could follow McNulty with 20km to go.
The chase behind tried to rally on the final climb up the St Mary Cemetery Hill with Abrahamsen and Mauro Schmid (Jayco Alula) leaving the rest of the chasers behind and making the quick bridge to the leading duo. A few kilometers later, Warbasse, Mayrhoffer, and Johannessen all rejoied the front making it seven riders left to decide the win with 5km to go.
With numbers in their favor, the favorites to win from the group of seven was Abrahamsen and Mayrhoffer who were both fast finishers and had teammates to help cover the moves from the three riders without a teammate. Nevertheless, Dujardan took the opportunity to sit back, recover from the effort on McNulty’s wheel, and got set for the sprint.
In the end, that was enough to seal a big win in the final sprint, out kicking those other fast riders and taking the biggest win of his career.