The Drenthe municipality of Aa en Hunze hosted a large field of mountain bikers and gravel riders today. This year, the Hondsrug Classic allowed gravel bikes alongside mountain bikes. Another change saw participants complete two 45-kilometer laps, whereas previous years had featured two 30-kilometer laps. It was a longer, 90-kilometer race in which Maike van der Duin crossed the finish line solo in first place, while Lars van Ark won the sprint from a six-man lead group.<\/p>\n
Initially, ten men set the pace in the woods and around the waters of ‘t Nije Hemelriek. The mountain bike trails alternated with faster connecting sections, giving the advantage to either the mountain bikers or the gravel riders at different points. Midway through the race, a six-man lead group formed, consisting of Lars van Ark, Niek Hoornsman, Bas Luca de Vries, Daniel Hessels, Ruben Nederveen, and Joeri Fledderus. Just before the finish, there was a tricky U-turn through loose sand; Van Ark took it first and secured an unchallenged victory ahead of Niek Hoornsman and Bas Luca de Vries. Gerben Mos and Martin Schuttert finished in tenth and twenty-fifth place, respectively.<\/p>\n
In the women’s race, former winner Lola Bakker was the first to pass the halfway point, followed by Yael Prenger and Maike van der Duin. During the second lap, Van der Duin turned her deficit into a comfortable lead, riding unchallenged to the finish to claim the Hondsrug Classic title. Bakker took silver, with Yael Prenger taking bronze shortly behind her. KMC teammates Mari\u00eblle Trouwborst and Rozanne Slik finished sixth and eighth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Drenthe municipality of Aa en Hunze hosted a large field of mountain bikers and gravel riders today. This year, the Hondsrug Classic allowed gravel bikes alongside mountain bikes. Another change saw participants complete two 45-kilometer laps, whereas previous years had featured two 30-kilometer laps. It was a longer, 90-kilometer race in which Maike van […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9588,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[71,171,83,101,170,169,74,68,90],"class_list":["post-9589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geen-categorie","tag-beach-en","tag-drenthe","tag-gravel-en","tag-gravelrace-en","tag-hondsrug","tag-hondsrugclassic","tag-marathon-en","tag-mountainbike-en","tag-offroad-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9589"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9592,"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9589\/revisions\/9592"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountainbiketeam.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}