Dutch delight as Charlotte plays it Kool in Tour win

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Charlotte Kool has beaten fellow Dutch rider Lorena Wiebes on the line to defend her leader’s yellow jersey in the second stage of the women’s Tour de France.

Kool, of the DSM-Firmenich PostNL team, made it two wins out of two in the eight-stage race as she passed Olympic road race silver medallist Marianne Vos before overtaking Wiebes just before the finishing line in 1 hour, 32 minutes and 49 seconds. Vos finished third.

“Today, I had a really good sprint in my legs,” she said.

The first of two stages Tuesday took the riders 69.7 kilometres from Dordrecht to the nearby port city of Rotterdam through a typical Dutch landscape of pancake flat polders, waterside dikes and past World Heritage-listed windmills before ending in downtown Rotterdam.

Kool was wearing the leader’s yellow jersey after winning the opening stage in The Hague on Monday.

She now has a narrow lead of 14 seconds over Anniina Ahtosalo of Finland in the overall race standings. Wiebes is third on the same time as Ahtosalo, while defending champion Demi Vollering of the Netherlands is part of a large group of riders 20 seconds behind Kool.

After recovering from Tuesday’s initial stage, the riders have an individual time trial of 6.3 kilometres around the streets of Rotterdam later in the afternoon.

Starting in the Netherlands, the race heads south into Belgium and then through eastern France to finish on August 18 at the top of the punishing climb of the Alpe-d’Huez’s famous 21 hairpin bends.

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