Van der Breggen, Boels Dolmans to skip Tour of California defence

Boels Dolmans will not travel to the US to defend Anna van der Breggen's title at the women's Tour of California in May. The team cited two reasons for the decision; being short of riders during a time of the season when Women's WorldTour stage races overlap, particularly after Lizzie Deignan announced that she was pregnant and would be putting her cycling career on hold.

"With the temporary leave of Lizzie, we are left with only ten riders for 2018," Boels Dolmans press officer Jeanine Laudy told Cyclingnews. "We definitely regret not being able to race the Amgen Tour of California, of which we hold fond memories."

Van der Breggen won the 2017 overall title by one second ahead of UnitedHealthcare's Katie Hall after taking a bonus seconds at an intermediate sprint on the final stage.

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Organisers of the Amgen Tour of California Women's Race empowered by SRAM announced the 15 teams that will participate in the event on Thursday. The three-day race is part of the 2018 Women's WorldTour and the world ranking determines which teams participate in the series.

Organisers are obliged to invite the top 15 ranked UCI Women's Teams and must accept entries from these teams that have responded positively to an invitation. After that, they can extend invitations to two national teams (one from the country hosting the event and one invitation to a foreign national team), and the remaining teams must be UCI Women's Teams.

Some of the world's top-15 ranked elite women's teams will be participating including Sunweb, Canyon-SRAM, Wiggle High5 and Astana Women.

You can read more at Cyclingnews.com