The podium ceremony on stage 2 of the Tour of Chongming Island was a special spectacle as Marta Lach and her Serratigit-WNT teammates Mylène de Zoete and Catherine Schweinberger occupied all three podiums.

With this unprecedented podium sweep, the team in blue and red made history on the Women's World Tour.

“This is incredible and it feels great to be on the podium with my teammates. It's something I didn't think about before the race, it was a perfect result for us,” Lack told Cycling News. [Laura (Ascencio) and Marta (Jaskulska) were chasing every breakaway. In the final, they and Sandra [Alonso] did a perfect leadout for the last 400 meters. Sandra had a super long leadout and then Katrin had a great long sprint.”

With Schweinberger in the lead, Lach took on the role of “sweeper” for stage 1 winner De Zoete, keeping his sprint rivals out of the slipstream of the yellow jersey.

Lach and de Zoete then passed their Austrian teammates on either side to take first and second place. Before the race, Lach asked de Zoete if she should be the one to take the win in these circumstances.

“She said, 'Yes, of course. I really appreciated this. In the end, it doesn't matter who wins, because it's a team win and a team podium,'” Rach explained.

“It's special for me and for the whole team.

While it is not unusual for two teammates to be on the podium in a race, it is even rarer for them to sweep the podium: since the Women's WorldTour category was introduced for the 2016 season, the last time a 1-2-3 occurred in a WWT race was at the 2023 Tour de France Femme only when SD Walks' Marlen Reusser, Demi Vollering, and Lotte Kopecky took third place on stage 8, the ITT in Pau.

SD Worx also swept two podiums in stages 2 and 9 of the 2021 Giro d'Italia Donne, which was not a World Tour race that season, by Anna van der Breggen, Ashley-Moolman-Pasio, and Vollaring. However, a 1-2-3 sprint win is unprecedented in at least the past nine seasons.

Nor is this something that can really be planned for, as seen in the lessons learned from this year's Tour of Britain women's SD Walks Pro Time. After winning the first three stages with Kopecký and Lorena Wiebes, the team wanted to reward Christine Majerus, so they held off Kopecký and Wiebes. However, Ruby Roseman-Gannon (Liv-Alura-Jayco) outran all three, and the team finished with a disappointing 2-3-4.

Entering the final stage, de Zoete, Lach, and Schweinberger were in first, second, and fourth place overall. And Lach promised that it was not over yet.

“Hopefully we can join the three on the GC podium. We will do our best to get as much as we possibly can. I'm very proud of the team and the cooperation between us, as a group and as teammates.