After 106 km off the front alone, Petra Stiasny was the last finisher at Cadel’s Road Race. But, for the Swiss rider, that was a win in itself.
Photo: Con Chronis/Getty Images for Visit Victoria.
A long-standing tradition of the sport is the doomed solo breakaway. These vary in the extent to which they are doomed – the extent to which they are calculated to maximise screen-time for sponsors, the extent to which they are comical or brave and fruitful, or somewhere in between. But at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race today, there was a solo breakaway that was a redemption arc in itself, no matter the end result.
We should probably start by laying out some key players, and some statistics, here. The protagonist of the doomed solo breakaway: Swiss rider Petra Stiasny. She’s 24 years old, a pure climber – in the words of her Human Powered Health director Clark Sheehan, the “purest of the pure” – and has been a women’s WorldTour rider for five years, bouncing around from Roland to Fenix-Deceuninck and back again, before landing with Human Powered Health a few weeks ago. So how does a Swiss pure climber end up going solo in the breakaway on a day like this, a day that is always on the other side of the world to her, and often flat and hot and exposed? A valid question. An important one.
What it’s like inside a doomed breakaway
Their move today was never going to pay off – but that wasn’t the point.
The answer: Stiasny needed it. Not the solo breakaway necessarily – some company would have been nice – but the opportunity to show to herself, to her new team, that there’s a reason she’s here. Which, in this case, looked like spending 106 kilometres off the front, by herself, building out a lead to the point that it looked like it would stick (over seven minutes, at the furthest ebb), getting ever-so-slowly wound back in, before getting caught at 35 km remaining, and finally crossing the line as last-placed finisher: a statistic that does absolutely no justice to the remarkable efforts of a big day of hard-fought solitude.
On many race days that end with a different rider on top of the podium to the one that spent most of the day in the limelight, there’s a knowing futility to it. Riders are sent to the front by the team, teams feel obliged to do so because of an unspoken sense of obligation to the race organiser, and the final outcome feels kind of predetermined. But watching it at the time, and speaking to Stiasny immediately after she crossed the line, it didn’t feel that this necessarily reflected the reality: there was enough of a hint of something else going on that it felt important to pursue this as the story that actually needed to be told about the day’s racing – more so than Ally Wollaston’s impressive back-to-back win, more so than the other dumb side quests of the day.
I didn’t know Petra Stiasny, but I wanted to. I wanted to know the story behind how she ended up in this position – going from an unknown (to me) to the most interesting person in the bike race, to being in a position of maybe winning, if the chips fell a different way, to dead last across the line.
Copy, paste, believe: An Ally Wollaston and FDJ-Suez masterclass
The first repeat win in the history of the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race was built on a foundation of teamwork and trust.
So, I waited. Not just waiting: splitting my attention between the justifiably happy people of FDJ United-Suez, but mostly waiting for Stiasny to finish, hoping that she would – after being caught at 35 km to go and then being shelled off the back at some point thereafter – roll through the finish. When she crossed the line, she rolled to a stop next to her team soigneurs and the teammates that hadn’t bailed for the hotel, and we chatted for less than a minute before she got yanked away for podium duties. She was to be awarded most combative rider – not a surprise, because for the bulk of the race, she was the only combative rider. That fleeting nugget of a conversation, in which she also outed herself as an Escape Collective podcast enthusiast, felt like enough to justify further interrogation. But as quickly as she was there, she was gone.
So (as always at a bike race) more waiting followed. Chats with winners. Chats with runners up. Chats with the first Australian finisher, new Australian champion Mackenzie Coupland, fresh off a joyous dip into the bay. And then, a chat with Petra Stiasny.
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