Takelast week
Chiara Consonni won the Philadelphia Cycling Classic Women on a circuit that hits the Manayunk Wall four times, beating a field stacked with Maggie Coles-Lyster and Alexandra Volstad. A track sprinter with an Olympic Madison gold picking this course for her first major road win outside the velodrome says the revived race already carries weight.
Consonni's résumé is built on the boards and three Giro d'Italia stage wins — not a repertoire that screams climb-heavy American circuit racing. That she rode for Canyon//SRAM into this field, against EF Education-Oatly's Volstad and Human Powered Health's Coles-Lyster, and came out ahead on a course with 17% pitches, is a credibility test the race passed on debut. A decade dark and back with an equal $75,000 purse, Philadelphia didn't get a nostalgia lap — it got a genuine result.
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