IN BRIEF
Marianne Vos won the UCI Gravel World Championships elite women’s race on Saturday in Nannup, Western Australia. Bicycling Australia describes her as “the first rider to win two UCI Gravel World Championships”, after her 2024 title in Leuven. She dropped Germany’s Rosa Klöser in the last four kilometres; Klöser crashed and finished 2nd, 27 seconds down, ahead of Larissa Hartog. It is Vos’s 15th rainbow jersey, across four disciplines.
Team Visma | Lease a Bike points out that this year “marked the first time the UCI Gravel World Championships were held outside Europe.” On the muddy tracks around Nannup, Marianne Vos added one more line to an already very long palmarès.
Gravel World Championships: the Nannup finale
The elite women’s course was 125.6 km long, with around 3,180 metres of climbing, says Team Visma | Lease a Bike, Vos’s team. Rain came into play: Cyclingnews reports that Australia’s Tiffany Cromwell, out in front, saw her 1min 09s lead melt away on the Ellis Creek climb, 2 km at 9.1%.
Vos and Klöser then rode together for 21 km before, 4 km from the finish, Vos tightened her shoes and launched a powerful acceleration, Cyclingnews reports. Klöser got back onto her wheel, but slid out in a rut on the right-hand side of the road and crashed, Cyclingnews continues. Quickly back on her bike, she crossed the line 27 seconds down and immediately congratulated the winner, Cyclingnews adds. Cyclingnews notes that the German had punctured earlier in the race, followed by a long solo chase.
Larissa Hartog beat Nele Laing in the sprint for 3rd place, putting two Dutch riders on the podium. Earlier, Cyclingnews reports, with less than 73 km to go, Geerike Schreurs and Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio went off the road on a descent; the Dutch rider received medical attention after the heavy crash.
| 1. Marianne Vos (Netherlands) | 4h 30min 04s |
| 2. Rosa Klöser (Germany) | à 27 s |
| 3. Larissa Hartog (Netherlands) | +2min 15s |
| 4. Nele Laing (Germany) | +2min 15s |
| 6. Sofia Gomez Villafañe (Argentina) | +5min 15s |
A 15th rainbow jersey for Marianne Vos
Cyclingnews has done the count: this win takes Vos’s tally of rainbow jerseys to 15, across four disciplines, including eight in cyclo-cross and two in gravel, plus titles on the road and on the track. Asked what the title meant to her, the 39-year-old simply answered: “A lot. Yeah, a lot.”
“This victory really means a lot to me,” she said after the finish, quoted by her team. She also described tougher terrain than she had anticipated: “It was more muddy than expected, actually,” with slippery sections. On the finale, she explained, quoted by Cyclingnews:
“I knew that that final corner around the top and then the descent were going to be tricky, so I wanted to be in front and take them my own lines. But of course it’s unfortunate that Rosa crashed there.”
Marianne Vos
