Lotte Kopecky won Belgian Championships against numbers advantage of other teams: "I never had full control"

Lotte Kopecky was clearly the strongest rider at Belgian Road race Championship. The SD Worx rider was on her own, but still managed to control the race and eventually finish calmly as she explains in an interview for WielerFlits.

"In the first part of the race it was not too bad for me, riding against the rest. The large teams mainly rode against each other. So I was able to save quite a bit of strength there," Kopecky said about the first half of the race. Then the chaos broke out. Kopecky had to chase everything down. "For me, it was effort after effort. I couldn't let certain groups ride away."

"Of course I never had full control, but in the end the gaps of the dangerous groups never got bigger than fifteen seconds. That was good. That's why it came down to a sprint. There was some headwind in that last kilometer and I saw Fenix-Deceuninck riders moving forward. I knew I had to be on their wheel," Kopecky did that very well as she held off everyone in a sprint.

"Actually, I believed more in the time trial than the road race. Everything had to go right here and I needed a good day to win. This certainly wasn't easy win." The coming period will be all about the Tour de France Femmes for the Belgian rider. "I will prepare at home, not at a training camp. In the Tour de France we'll mainly ride for Demi Vollering and Lorena Wiebes, so maybe you will often see the Belgian jersey riding at the head of the peloton," Kopecky concluded.