Charlotte Kool (dsm-firmenich) had been feeling off for months but no one knew why, exactly. It started when she fell ill in February, just before the UAE Tour, which left her ‘heartbroken’ on the sidelines.
2023 had been a breakthrough year for the Dutchwoman. When sprinting sensation Lorena Wiebes departed the team for SD Worx, Kool seized her opportunity to fill the void. An exciting rivalry between the two compatriots soon unfolded, with Kool coming out on top at stages of the UAE Tour Women and again at RideLondon Classique. And with two more stage wins at the 2023 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, Kool cemented her position as one of the best sprinters in the peloton.
Fueled by her remarkable season, Kool hit the winter training with renewed confidence and determination and eagerly anticipated the early season, head-to-head sprint battles at the 2024 UAE Tour Women.
“I trained for months towards this first goal of the season. First chance to show my ‘winter improvements’ is gone but we come back stronger as always,” she said at the time. But the comeback wouldn’t come. Not quite.
All season long, her big sprinting rival continued her rise into dominance while she herself missed the top step time and again.
Eight times this season, she finished second. And each time, when the action hit its peak, inside the chaos of the final meters of a race when she's normally at her best, the air would suddenly get thin. The high-intensity ceiling reached earlier than before.
“It wasn’t my training. I was training well but at the very end of a race, my torso felt stuck. It’s hard to explain,” Kool said.
She saw doctors, chiropractors and physiotherapists but answers didn’t come, and neither did the longed-for stage wins. Frustration was mounting.
“It wasn’t even all the second places. I just wanted to feel like myself again,” Kool explains.
Then, two weeks ago, her medical team had a breakthrough. She’d caught another virus after the Baloise Ladies Tour in July and felt very short of breath. Bloodwork and more research followed until a new set of medical experts brought relief to the lingering problem.
“It goes back to February,” Kools told Cycling Weekly. “I got really sick. I had a high fever and breathing problems. What can happen when you’ve been sick for a long time is that you start breathing shallow and high in the torso. Over time, this affects the breathing patterns, and the torso gets restricted."
Through bodywork and exercises, her body started to come loose again. And not a moment too soon.
Some suggested she continue her medical quest until after the Tour. ”But this wasn’t about the Tour anymore, it was about my health,” Kool said. “I want to know what was going on. I want to feel like myself.”
On the eve of the Tour de France Femmes, Kool was brimming with confidence – something that had been missing all season. The first stages of the third edition of the biggest race on the women’s calendar were made for her: fast, flat and in her home country. More than feeling relieved, she was hungry, no, downright starving, for a win.
We’ll never know if Wiebes’ mechanical mishap in the final meters of the race would have changed the outcome, but none of that matters. After a season of seconds, Kool won big, reaching the finish line of the Tour de France opener in first and riding herself into the yellow and green jersey.
"I finally felt myself again, and I'm really happy the solution came in time," she said.
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