Andreas Seewald and Martin Stošek (Canyon Northwave MTB) won the first 92km stage of the Absa Cape Epic with a controlled and well-paced run from start to finish and clinched the men's category leader jerseys in the process.
Living up to the promise of the Prologue, Speed Company Racing's Georg Egger and Lukas Baum got off to a brilliant start on stage, as well as Nino Schurter and Lars Forster of SCOTT-SRAM.
Maxine Marotte and Keegan Swenson (Santa Cruz), Hans Becking and Jose Dias (BUFF-MEGAMO) and Fabian Rabensteiner and Wout Alleman (Wilier-Pirelli) all drove well, slowly breaking away from the wearers of the leader's jersey Matt Beers and Christopher Blevins (Toyota-NinetyOne-Specialized).
The nature of the race changed significantly just before the main climb of the stage, where Schurter suffered his second rear tire puncture. Again, the team was unsuccessful with the repairs and eventually replaced the rear wheel with the spare team. “It's hard to motivate yourself when you fall so far behind. It's very mentally draining, ”said Schurter,“ But we did what we could and we'll be racing hard in stage 2 ”.
At the same time, Matt Beers had stomach problems, and Christopher Blevins could do nothing but stay with his partner.
Beers added: “I'm not sure what happened. My stomach has been giving me problems all day and I couldn't feed myself. ”.
Seewald and Stošek have had no such problems, with Seewald in particular looking every inch the Mountain Bike Marathon World Champion that he is. The Canyon duo dominated the stage finishing two and a half minutes ahead of BUFF-MEGAMO.
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The women's race saw the victory of NinetyOne-songo-Specialized (Sofía Gómez Villafane and Haley Batten) who also took the lead in the general classification, thus securing the orange leader's jersey before stage 2.
Candice Lill and Mariske Strauss were the first to attack, followed by Gómez Villafane and Batten who then took the lead before the main climb of the stage.
NinetyOne-songo-Specialized began to struggle uphill, allowing Symbtech ZA (Ariane Lüthi and Amy Wakefield) to take the lead.
Lüthi and Wakefield had, at one point, a three-minute lead but a puncture at the end allowed the duo Gómez Villafane and Batten to return and take the victory.
BMC MTB Racing (Robyn de Groot and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot), Prologue winners and overnight leader in CM.com's women's category, battled on the day, finishing fourth and selling their orange jerseys to NinetyOne-songo-Specialized. “I wasn't feeling very well, bad feelings,” said Ferrand-Prévot.
ORDER OF ARRIVAL
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Tune in to the live broadcast of Phase 2 from 07:30 on https://www.cape-epic.com/.
