Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race Women 2027

Challambra Crescent is one kilometer long and gains 87 meters, an average of 8.7 percent, with 11 percent near the top. In 2026 the race was 142.4 kilometers long and ended on a 21-kilometer circuit in Geelong with two ascents of the climb. After the top came a descent and two short rises, out of Queens Park and on Melville Avenue, before the waterfront.

Ally Wollaston won the 2026 race, and she was in trouble both times up the climb. On the first ascent Mavi García led a group of 15 clear, with Magdeleine Vallières, then world champion, on her wheel, and a chase closed the gap on the descent. On the second ascent Vallières attacked and Wollaston was dropped. She chased alone and was back with seven kilometers to go. Then Rosita Reijnhout, the 2024 winner, attacked, the group split, and Wollaston was on the wrong side of it. Her FDJ United-SUEZ teammate Amber Kraak led the chase that brought the two groups together inside the last five kilometers.

Wollaston won the sprint of 12 riders from Josie Nelson and Mireia Benito, and said that without her teammates the race would have been gone. No other rider has won the women's race twice. In 2025 she went over Challambra with the front group and won the sprint from a group of 14.

Since 2023 the run from the top to the waterfront has been long enough for a chase to organize and short enough for an attack to hold, and the race has gone both ways. In 2023 Loes Adegeest and Amanda Spratt rode away on the last ascent, and Adegeest won the sprint of two. In 2024 Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig went clear alone on the last ascent, Reijnhout and Dominika Włodarczyk caught her on the way to the finish, and Reijnhout, then 19, rode away from both to win.