South African Road Championships - CN

South Africa, March 4-6, 2004

Main Page Results Previous Day

Day 3 - March 7: Durbanville - Women's Road Race, 96 km

Fifth title for Anriette

There were a number of ways of looking at Sunday's 2004 SA women's cycling championship, and the first was obviously that Proline's Anriette Schoeman had bagged an incredible fifth consecutive title.

While that is a huge achievement, there were other aspects to the race in Durbanville near Cape Town which were equally deserving of praise. The stunning performance of Microsoft's United States based all-rounder, Anke Erlank, who gave SA's top two women's teams not only a major scare but also a superb run for their money, was the talk of the day.

Erlank, the former X-terra triathlon world champion, only just lost out to a trio of hot local sprinters in a desperate up-hill sprint finish at the top of the notorious Tikkiedraai climb. However, it was her presence in the race which dominated the minds and actions of everyone else involved in the title battle and all eyes were on the powerful Anke at every stage of the race.

To a degree she had precipitated that situation herself as it was well-known before the race that she intended to win the title and had made no effort to disguise her poor opinion of SA women's cycling. "No one makes any effort to race the whole way, they all sit together pedaling nicely and then sprint for the line in the last few hundred metres," she commented the evening before the race.

Incredibly, that's exactly the kind of race she was caught up in but, given her lack of a supporting team, her own position was surely understandable, "I'm just going to have do it all myself," was another succinct pre-race comment.

From the start Anke was in the middle of a huge bunch, but surprisingly, it was Proline's Cape Epic mountain-bike winner, Hanlie Booyens, who struck out on her own on the first climb.

The petite but powerful all-rounder then went on to "stay away" for 54km, the longest successful lone break in SA women's championship history, before she had a succession of chain troubles and finally came to a stop at the top of the climb at Robinson Road where it had all begun.

By then, many had thought that she was going to steal the title from under the noses of the favourites as the gap had stretched to over two minutes at one stage. "My job was to be a bit of a decoy but I kind of got carried away," said the ever-smiling Hanlie adding, without a trace of regret, "It was all huge fun."

At that point the rest of the Proline team were concentrating hard on getting their defending champion, Anriette, to the line, and both they and Anke had little opposition from the Liberty team who were in turn doing their best to shepherd, their leader, Ronel van Wyk, into the same position.

"No one was doing any attacking and that's so negative; you would think in an Olympic year they would at least be doing something to show aggression and competitiveness but based on this display no SA women are going to the Athens Games," commented Tony Harding, the SA national team manager and one of the selectors.

The final stages of the championship tussle saw a continuation of the teams jockeying for position as well as tracking every move by the indefatigable Anke, until the final sprint was launched. This came at least 500 metres from the line when Anke made the first move and Anriette went with her. They were immediately followed Ronel and Tuks teamster, Chrissie Viljoen.

Anke's bravery was again shown in her bold attempt to win the title from three recognized sprinters. But it just wasn't to be because at the line it was Anriette just metres ahead of Ronel who had "kicked" again and brought third placer Chrissie Viljoen with her past the luckless Anke.

Results

1 Anriette Schoeman (ProLine/SuperCD)
2 Ronel van Wyk (Liberty)
3 Chrissie Viljoen (Tuks/Hypo)