The Deakin College Elite Girls’s Race on the Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race delivers simply the kind of punchy course Australian rider Grace Brown (FDJ-SUEZ-Futuroscope) has excelled on in current seasons and with the return of the highest tier Australian race in 2023, it’s now virtually time to see if she will add a Girls’s WorldTour victory on residence soil to her ever rising outcomes listing.
On the official launch of the race this week the Victorian-based rider opened up what’s going to quickly be a stream of bulletins about key riders set to line up on the Geelong begin line on Saturday January 28. Irrespective of who else follows she shall be not possible to budge from the highest ranks of the favourites listing.
“I’ve had a extremely nice season in 2022 and ticked some massive outcomes off the bucket listing, however the Cadel Evans Highway Race remains to be one which I’m but to attain,” stated Brown on the launch in Geelong this week, at Deakin College’s Waurn Ponds campus. “However I’m hoping I can begin my 2023 season off at a excessive and hopefully goal for a outcome at this race right here in Geelong.”
“I feel it’s a course that’s suited to me so I’ve at all times had behind my thoughts that I’d wish to win it in the future and hopefully this subsequent version shall be that chance.”
Brown’s mixed skills – having the ability to get away on punchy climbs, settle into time trial mode to maintain the hole if she is out solo or put in a flip of velocity that places her within the operating if she comes into the road amongst a small break – makes for a formidable contender on the 143km race. In actual fact, even throughout her first time pinning a quantity on on the occasion, as a comparatively new face on the home scene in Australia, Brown slotted into the worldwide area among the many high 30.
Her finest outcome to this point was in 2019, when she got here tenth in considered one of her first races as knowledgeable, even whereas using in help of then teammates Amanda Spratt and Lucy Kennedy who each completed on the rostrum.
The COVID-19 pandemic and related border closures imply the final time the race was run was in 2020. Nonetheless, then Brown didn’t get a lot of an opportunity to see what she might do within the first Girls’s WorldTour race on Australian soil, with massive crashes on a moist and windy day. For Brown it was a DNF, simply because it was for practically a 3rd of the sphere.
The 30-year-old is now working towards a greater end result within the first version of the race in three years however she is going to face loads of competitors, notably because the Santos Girls’s Tour Down Below, which runs earlier within the month, has additionally been lifted to the highest racing classification. That offers high groups and riders much more cause to make the journey out to Australia for the January racing.
It additionally will not simply be the competitors that ranges up the problem. The Deakin College Elite Girls’s Race is greater than 20km longer than its final version in 2020 and now heads inland from Geelong after which goes alongside the Nice Ocean Highway earlier than returning to the coastal metropolis for 2 laps of a ending course that features the Challambra Crescent climb as its centrepiece.
“Because the course has modified just a little bit this yr – it’s getting into the wrong way – now we have some hills to begin with and I feel it will likely be a extremely good alternative for there to be an early breakaway within the race. It should change the dynamics of the race as an entire,” stated Brown.
“Additionally there’s an additional lap of the hills on the end of the race so general I count on it will likely be much more difficult than it has been previously, however the ladies’s peloton is getting stronger and stronger every year so I feel everybody shall be up for that problem.”
