The penultimate day of action saw the peloton head to the hills at Tour de Normandie where some rainy weather conditions awaited them. It was a controlled start before the attacks started in the middle portion of the race, where the Team dsm-firmenich PostNL squad rode well to be present in the majority of the moves. A dangerous duo escaped which included eventual stage winner Stephens. Behind, the team kept rolling the dice and tried to go clear, with Josie Nelson eventually getting a gap on the last kicker before the climb to the line. Powering over the top, she was able to distance fellow attacker Verhulst but on the downhill and drag up to the line Verhulst was able to claw her way back to Nelson, passing her on the kick to the line; which meant Nelson took a strong fourth place on the line.
Nelson said: “It was an explosive race today with a lot of attacking in the middle section of the race. Maeve did a fantastic job for the team making sure she was in all of the big moves and Abi tried a few attacks herself but nothing stuck until the local laps. Daniek did a super job at positioning us in the local laps and the race started kicking off on the main climb with multiple attacks. Unfortunately, we missed the winning break of two girls but we were following everything else. I attacked up the kicker with Gladys [Verhulst] and then eventually went solo from her in the last few kilometres of it, but unfortunately she caught me on the finishing climb so we just missed out on the podium. We rode well today as a team though and will go for it again tomorrow.”