Marjolein van ’t Geloof continued Laboral Kutxa – Fundación Euskadi’s prolific El Salvador run by winning the Grand Prix Oriente (UCI 1.1), finishing off a controlled day with the fastest kick in a full bunch sprint in Usulután. Vittoria Grassi (Vini Fantini – BePink) took second, while Van ’t Geloof’s team-mate Catalina Anais Soto completed the podium in third.
The context matters here. Van ’t Geloof is not simply picking up early-season placings, she is converting opportunities. After taking a stage at the Tour El Salvador (2.1), she has now backed it up with another victory in the same country, on a parcours that offered almost no excuses and demanded pure positioning, timing, and nerve.
A route that pointed stubbornly towards a bunch finish
The Grand Prix Oriente was only 76km long and essentially flat, with no meaningful climbing to force natural selection. That combination usually produces a familiar pattern: early ambition gets quietly neutralised, teams with speed settle into control, and the real race becomes a fight for space rather than altitude.
With so little terrain to work with, the decisive factors were always going to be wind awareness, discipline through the middle third, and then the final kilometres where positioning becomes everything. In that sense, the outcome was not accidental, it was engineered by the teams who stayed organised when others began to gamble for wheels.
How Laboral Kutxa shaped the finish
Laboral Kutxa arrived at the finale with options, and that matters in sprint finishes on flat courses. You are not only riding to launch your fastest finisher, you are also riding to reduce chaos for everyone else. The Basque squad held their line, protected their sprinter, and delivered Van ’t Geloof into the last stretch with the kind of timing that allows a rider to sprint on instinct rather than in panic.
When the sprint opened, Van ’t Geloof’s acceleration was the difference. Grassi followed through strongly for second, while Soto’s third place underlined just how well the team executed the final phase, both in speed and in positioning.
Van ’t Geloof: “I knew this race suited me”
“It’s unbelievable,” Van ’t Geloof said in a statement released by her team. “I knew this race suited me because the course was completely flat. I’d been looking forward to it all week while helping my team-mates during the mountain stages. Today my team-mates delivered me perfectly, and I’m hugely grateful for their support.”
This win also carries a personal edge. Van ’t Geloof’s last victory before this month came back in 2022, and she was explicit about what this sudden run of results means for her season. “I hadn’t won for three years and now I’ve taken two victories in two weeks,” she said. “Starting the season like this gives me a huge boost of confidence, especially with the classics in mind, because they are my main goal.”
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