Giro d'Italia Donne: Anna van der Breggen in ‘luxury’ after winning Stage 4, Lizzie Deignan up to fourth

Updated 05/07/2021 at 21:04 GMT

Anna van der Breggen, retiring at the end of the year, is in a strong position to win a fourth maglia rosa after winning the fourth stage of the Giro d'Italia Donne. The world champion leads the GC by almost three minutes, while Britain’s Lizzie Deignan is up to fourth after a “surprise” time trial result.

‘I am in a very luxury position’ - Van der Breggen after Stage 4 win

Anna van der Breggen (SD Worx) admits she is in a “luxury” position after extending her Giro d'Italia Donne lead with victory in the stage 4 mountain time trial.

A time of 24:58 minutes was enough for Van der Breggen to open up a 2:51 lead over teammate Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio in the general classification.

Chasing a fourth maglia rosa in her retirement year, world champion Van der Breggen knows she’ll be hard to beat.

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“I'm in a very luxury position to have the girls around me and it's really nice to race with them,” said Van der Breggen.

“And also for my last year to do it like this is nice. But still we are only halfway and you still need to have good legs, I mean, there are also flat stages coming up and some hard climb stages.

So, hopefully it stays like this but I think for sure we have to fight for it.

Meanwhile, Britain’s Lizzie Deignan (Trek-Segafredo) moved up to fourth in the GC after surprising herself in the time trial.

“I'm surprised with my TT. I cannot remember the last time I did a full gas time trial. Normally, they're rest days for me," Deignan said.

"It’s been a long time, but obviously I do these 20-min tests in training, so I just focused on trying to my threshold power. It seemed to work out. I couldn’t have gone harder; I think I paced it pretty well, so I am happy with my performance.”