“A stress fracture is caused by excessive and prolonged loading over time, whereby the homeostasis between osteoblasts and osteoclasts is disrupted, resulting in altered bone balance. In fact, it is often experienced by endurance athletes, who usually go through an increased workload over a concentrated period of time”.

For 6 months Liane Lippert struggled with this unusual, and for that reason somewhat difficult to interpret, injury. A pain experienced in training back in December had set off alarm bells, she went a couple of weeks without a bicycle, got back to it but the problem was still there. This went on for several weeks, months, until April, when she finally began to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

The German Movistar athlete managed to return to racing, but the strokes of the talent admired last year were never seen, until today, in Stage 6 of the Giro d’Italia Women 2024, the longest of the entire competition with its 159 km from San Benedetto del Tronto to Chieti. In a stage with hardly any flat ground to play with, Lippert found herself in front almost by accident, on the descent after the Penne climb, when Elise Chabbey’s (Canyon/SRAM) crash gave her, Erica Magnaldi (UAE Team ADQ), Ruth Edwards (Human Powered Health) and Ane Santseteban (Laboral Kutxa-Fundacion Euskadi) a chance to wave goodbye to the peloton and take off.

Behind, Elisa Longo Borghini (Lidl Trek) was quite happy to let the attackers go, rather than having her teammates chasing them to then play for time bonuses with a very powerful athlete such as Lotte Kopecky (SD Worx) and risk losing the Maglia Rosa, since the Belgian only needed 4 seconds to fly to the top of GC. Heading up to Chieti, Lippert resisted Magnaldi’s forcing and then outsprinted both her and Edwards in a three-girl sprint. Looks like she can finally pick up her career where she left off before the stress fracture.