Speed and strength are key components to winning a professional bike race. Staying upright might be nearly as important.
On a day when crashes, flat tires and heavy rains took out several competitors, Sandy Dujardin, a French rider for Team TotalEnergies, weathered those pitfalls and all of his peers to capture the 2025 Maryland Cycling Classic on Saturday afternoon in Baltimore.
Dujardin completed the six-lap, 107.4-mile loop through the city in 3 hours, 48 minutes, 25 seconds. He finished on Pratt Street just ahead of Norway's Jonas Abrahamsen of Uno-X Mobility, Germany's Marius Mayrhofer of Tudor Pro Cycling, the United States' Brandon McNulty of Team USA, Switzerland's Mauro Schmid of Jayco AlUla, and Norway's Anders Halland Johannessen of Uno-X Mobility -- all of whom finished with the same time.
"I'm really proud of it," Dujardin, 28, said through an interpreter. "The team came all this way just to do the Maryland Cycling Classic. So that represents a lot of travel for us. We came with one goal, and that was to win, and we accomplished it. So it's just happiness for the team."
Dujardin's ability to cross the finish line differed from the fates of some of his toughest competitors. Denmark's Mattias Skjelmose of Lidl-Trek, the 2023 Maryland Cycling Classic champion, bowed out of the event after crashing on a cobblestone section in the first lap.
The United States' Neilson Powless of EF Education-EasyPost, who placed second and third in the respective 2022 and 2023 versions of the Maryland Cycling Classic, suffered a flat tire on the final lap that took considerable time to replace and then forced him to switch bikes. He ended up in 18th place -- more than 5:30 behind Dujardin.
A 20-minute storm that turned torrential for a few minutes made the roads slick, and several riders slipped and touched barriers or fellow competitors' bikes. Dujardin noted how key it was to stay upright.
"I was being really careful with how close I was following," he said in French. "I was not staying too close to people in front of me in case something like that happened. I was choosing my own line. I didn't just blindly follow the rider in front of me because I knew the roads were pretty dangerous and slippery. I saw the mechanical problems that riders were having, and I was just wishing that I wasn't going to have one myself. I ended up getting lucky in the end that I didn't have any."
The conditions on the Baltimore streets convinced Abrahamsen, 29, to try to stay in front or near the front to avoid crashing out.
"I know it was slippery when it started to rain, especially on the cobbles," he said. "It gets slippery, and then you have to be in the front, and I was in the front and attacking, and maybe that helped me."
Not even a flat tire could deter Poland's Agnieszka Skalniak-Sojka from accomplishing her mission.
Skalniak-Sojka, who represented Canyon-Sram Zondacrypto, overcame that mechanical problem and a pair of competitors to win the inaugural women's race of the Maryland Cycling Classic on Saturday morning.
Skalniak-Sojka, a three-time national champion in Poland, crossed the finish line on Pratt Street in 2 hours, 51 minutes, 59 seconds. In a finish that required a visual review, Canadian Alison Jackson of EF Education-Oatly and American Emma Langley of Aegis Cycling Foundation finished second and third, respectively, in the same time.
"In the end, it was super close, but I'm super proud that I made the victory," Skalniak-Sojka, 29, said. "I'm grateful for all the team, that they worked really hard today for me and that they believed in me."
That Skalniak-Sojka even found herself jockeying to win the race seemed a distant prospect after she suffered a flat tire while riding over cobblestones on the third lap of the four-lap circuit totaling 71.6 miles through the streets of the city. Despite the hiccup, however, Skalniak-Sojka credited her desire to win for giving her the will to make up for lost time.
"I needed to believe in myself that I could come back," she said. "It was not easy, but our mechanic was super quick. I rested up a bit, and I was ready to fight."
In the final stretch down Pratt Street, a pack including Skalniak-Sojka, Jackson, Langley and Canadian Clara Edmond of EF Education-Oatly (fourth place in 2:52:03) broke away from the peloton. Jackson said she trailed Edmond before Skalniak-Sojka surged to the front with about 200 meters to go.
Jackson, a three-time national champion in Canada, caught Skalniak-Sojka and thought she had edged her across the finish line courtesy of leaning her weight towards the rear of her bike while continuing to propel the bike forward - a tactic in the sport called a bike throw.
"I was coming up on the girl, and we were pretty close," Jackson, 36, said. "She was still ahead maybe an inch. So I did my bike throw, and when I looked back on the video, I was ahead, but it's a little bit uphill, and I did my bike throw a bit too soon. So the couple more pedal strokes that she had got me in the end."
Skalniak-Sojka said she knew she had to begin her final push earlier than Jackson - whom Skalniak-Sojka described as a better sprinter - might have wanted to engage.
"When I saw 200 and saw they didn't start, I was like, 'Yeah, I need to go,'" she said. "I'm not really a pure sprinter that I can sprint from 100 meters to go. So I needed to start earlier than the pure sprinters."
Jackson acknowledged that the nature of Saturday's loss stings.
"Something like this, it haunts you, and you'll be up all night thinking about how you could have made it different," she said. "For sure, I could've won if I had started my sprint earlier or I just started my sprint earlier like a maniac and gone really full-full the whole time or if I just waited another meter to do my bike throw."
The Benin national team participated in the event, becoming the African squad to compete in a race in North America sanctioned by Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) - the sport's world governing body that endorses, among others, the Tour de France. Although none of the four-member team finished the competition, Charlotte Metoevi, her nation's U23 National Road Cycling Champion who placed third at the most recent African Continental Championships Track event, said she and her teammates were proud to represent their West African country.
"We approached the race with a lot of courage and pride because we knew that we were the first and only African female team to be racing," Metoevi, 20, said as translated by Agniola Ahouanmenou, the Benin ambassador to the United States. "So in our preparation, we put a lot of effort into it."