What does it take to win the Tour of Flanders?
According to Elisa Longon Borghini’s Strava ride, which she uploaded after taking first place with an almost 20 mile solo breakaway, you’d need to ride 89 miles at 23.2mph, whilst accumulating 4,121ft of climbing.
Elisa uploaded her ride, calling it ‘Ronde Van Vlaanderen 2015 – A volte anche i macinini vincono le gare…’, meaning ‘Tour of Flanders 2015 – sometimes the grinders win races…’.
She’s referring, rather modestly to the roleur style of riding that saw her breakaway with 30km to go to the end of the gruelling cobbled classic, taking the win without giving the pure sprinters at the end a chance to steal victory from her.
Borghini picked up 103 segment ‘cups’ on her ride, nabbing the Queen of the Mountain title on ten of them, including the 8% Kanarie einde, 4% Hotondberg and the ‘Oude Kwaremont + Paterberg’ segment whose KOM is Ettixx-Quick Step rider Niki Terpstra.
The overall elevation of the ride was 4,121ft, and Borghini reached a screeching 45.4mph as her max.
Even in the final stretch, when Borghini had almost a minute ahead of the chasers, she was riding at over 25 mph – her commitment to winning this race by that point must have been all encompassing.
You can see from Elisa’s effort on the 12% Paterberg in February that she’d been training on the course – taking the KOM ahead of riders racing on April 5 and Julian D’Hoore’s pre race recce on Apriil 1.
Unfortunatrely, but rather understandably, we can’t see any heart rate data or power data from the ride.
The estimated 450 watts over Hotondberg gives us a fair idea how hard the Wiggle Honda rider was racing, but the figure doesn’t take into account aerodynamics or weather conditions so we’ll have to accept being left wondering over the exact figures.
You can also see the rides from 16 other members of the female peloton on the same day, and Borghini has 23 ‘kudos’ thumbs up (at time of writing!) – though we reckon she deserves a lot more!
