Lorena Wiebes heads back to Italy after Women's Giro disqualification: ‘She needs some rest’

The disqualification of Lorena Wiebes at the Giro d’Italia on Saturday was a huge blow for SD Worx-Protime. The Dutch champion had first given everyone reason to cheer with a phenomenal sprint victory, but the disqualification afterwards hit hard. Wiebes had to go home, but in the meantime she is already on her way back to Italy.

In Ravenna, Wiebes sprinted to victory with a big show of power in the opening stage of the Giro d’Italia. She left Elisa Balsamo of Lidl-Trek behind by bike lengths and got on the podium to put on the pink jersey. But when the bike was weighed, it came out at 6.78 kilos: 20 grams too light. And so Wiebes was removed from the race. Balsamo therefore became the new pink jersey wearer.

SD Worx-Protime will challenge the decision, but that will be too late for Wiebes, who had already flown back to the Netherlands. “When Lorena returned to the Netherlands on Sunday, her parents picked her up from Schiphol and she went to the beach in the afternoon to get some fresh air and let everything sink in,” her private manager Jan Boskamp told De Telegraaf. “She was a bundle of misery.”

The Dutch team was furious, and said its own weighing had shown that the bike was in fact on weight. Boskamp calls the jury’s decision “scandalous”. “But it is what it is. Still: the way the UCI handled this incident was horribly amateurish. The way they were messing around with that scale was beyond description.”

Wiebes came to Italy with big ambitions and had already struck the first blow. “Lorena was completely ready for this Giro. She did altitude camps, slept in altitude rooms. She could have won four stages. Everybody could see on Saturday how good she was. She looked perfect. And then, two hours later, the news comes that her bike was a slice of cheese too heavy.”

Still, Wiebes has not been sitting still, because she is on her way back to Italy. “In a camper, on her own, on the way to a campsite in Italy. Not just for a holiday, but also to train. She wants to be good in Copenhagen on 13 June, for the WorldTour sprint race, the Copenhagen Sprint. Lorena is a strong girl, she will definitely get over this. But she does need some rest now.”