The anticipation is already development to a brand new 12 months of Girls’s WorldTour racing with the Santos Girls’s Excursion Down Underneath saying a deeper box of most sensible tier groups in addition to a gaggle of headline riders for 2024 that features a trio of former winners.
The riders that will likely be on the place to begin of the January 12 to fourteen race come with protecting champion Grace Brown (FDJ-Suez) and 2020 winner Ruth Edwards (nee Winder), with the rider from the US finishing her two season retirement as she returns to the pro peloton on the Australian race with Human Powered Well being. Then there may be 2017 to 2019 winner Amanda Spratt (Lidl-Trek) who completes the crowd of former winners that supply plentiful gas for a gripping ultimate showdown on Willunga Hill.
“It’s at all times thrilling to start out a brand new season on the Santos Excursion Down Underneath and in 2024, there’s a bit extra to stay up for with the addition of Willunga Hill to the ladies’s WorldTour race for the primary time,” Spratt stated. “I will’t deny that I’ve my eyes set on a just right efficiency there, it’s a large objective of mine.
“General, I’ve nice recollections of this race having gained it 3 times and I’m keen to take a look at to duplicate that luck this time. I used to be shut closing 12 months, agonisingly shut you want to say, so I’m actually motivated to come back again to race for the victory in all places once more,” stated Spratt, who completed in 2d position total in 2023, simply ten seconds at the back of Brown.
Australian champion Brodie Chapman, Spratt’s teammate, can also be at the get started listing along South Australian native Tiffany Cromwell (Canyon-SRAM) at the side of Audrey Cordon-Ragot, Lily Williams and Megan Jastrab of Human Powered Well being.
The race – which was once cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 and 2022 after which returned to the calendar with Girls’s WorldTour standing in 2023 – additionally seems to be set to ship a deeper box in 2024.
There have been six of the 15 Girls’s WorldTeams on the race in 2023, with attendance no longer mandated for the ladies’s most sensible tier squads. On the other hand, this time 8 most sensible tier groups have already been showed together with Girls’s Excursion Down Underneath learners Canyon-SRAM, Jumbo-Visma, dsm-firmenich and UAE Crew ADQ. They are going to face up in opposition to a returning FDJ-Suez and Lidl-Trek, in addition to Human Powered Well being and, in fact, Australian staff Liv-AlUla-Jayco.
“We’re delighted to announce that such a lot of UCI Girls’s WorldTour groups have thus far made the dedication to shuttle to Adelaide in January and compete on the Santos Excursion Down Underneath,” race director Stuart O’Grady stated. “To have such a lot of world-class riders is a testomony to our tournament and the continuing enlargement and recognition of ladies’s biking.”
The 3-stage ladies’s race will get started with a sprinters level from Hahndorf to Campbelltown on Friday January 12, shifting right into a difficult weekend with an afternoon for the all-rounders on Saturday and the Willunga finale for the climbers on Sunday January 14. The males’s WorldTour race then runs from Tuesday January 16 to Sunday January 21.
