Over the weekend, the UnitedHealthcare team’s array of talent was on display both in the U.S. and Europe at two very different “criteriums.”
Stateside, at the Sunny King Criterium, in Anniston, Alabama, Heather Barnes won the first stop on the USA Cycling National Criterium Calendar (NCC) ahead of teammate and criterium national champion Coryn Rivera.
“I couldn’t be happier with how today’s race went, the team rode a near perfect race, taking control when they needed to, and executing a textbook lead-out to take first and second,” said Rachel Heal, the team’s sporting director.
UnitedHealthcare’s men’s crit team also delivered a strong performance in Alabama, putting Luke Keough and Hilton Clarke into a seven-rider breakaway that lapped the field. Keough would go on to finish second behind winner Ty Magner (Hincapie), with Clark in third place.
Meanwhile, at the two-day, three-stage Critérium International in Corsica — a race quite unlike American-style criteriums — UHC’s Marco Canola won the mountains classification after making the breakaway on Sunday’s stage 3, a 189.5km race from Porto Vecchio to a mountaintop finish at Col de l’Ospedale, 3,100 feet above the Mediterranean. Canola secured the polka-dot jersey by claiming six of the seven available KOM sprints on the stage.
The team’s international squad seems to have a taste for mountains classifications, as American Kiel Reijnen claimed the climber’s jersey in Tour de Langkawi earlier in March.
Looking ahead, UHC’s domestic, criterium-focused squad has a full slate of racing ahead, as the NCC runs all the way through September. Their European counterparts head next to Route Adelie-Vitre in France on Friday, with their spring swing focused on La Flèche Wallonne in Belgium, April 22.
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