bounced back into the overall lead at the Tour of Britain, beating the likes of Giacomo Nizzolo (Qhubeka-NextHash) and Mark Cavendish (Deceuninck-QuickStep) in a sprint finish in Warrington.
The 22-year-old Briton, who ceded the lead to Wout van Aert (Jumbo-Visma) atop Great Orme the previous afternoon, regained the blue jersey after the Belgian champion was caught up in a late crash that made for a messy finale.
Only a small group contested the final dash for the line, but Hayter still had to fend off the two fastest flat sprinters in the bunch in Nizzolo and Cavendish. The European champion challenged him on his left but didn’t have the power to get in front, while Cavendish appeared to find himself boxed between the two and didn’t open the taps completely.
As the British veteran free-wheeled to the line, he was passed by Dan McLay (Arkéa-Samsic) and Luke Lamperti (Trinity Racing), who placed third and fourth, respectively.
Cavendish’s lack of final acceleration perhaps had something to do with the fact that he had to dig deep uphill to close a gap that had opened between the first five riders and the rest of the bunch as a result of the crash, which occurred when two riders slipped out on a left-hand bend with 700 metres to go. One of them was Hayter’s teammate Owain Doull, but the Ineos leader squeezed through alongside Michal Kwiatkowski to emerge in a five-man group with Julian Alaphilippe (Deceuninck-QuickStep), Colin Joyce (Rally Cycling), and Lamperti.
Cavendish dragged Nizzolo, McLay and a couple of riders over, but there was a gap back to the next group, which contained race leader Van Aert. The Belgian didn’t hit the deck himself, and was awarded the same time as Hayter given the incident occurred inside the final 3km, but the 10 bonus seconds for the win meant he had to hand back the jersey.
Hayter now leads the race by eight seconds over Van Aert, with Alaphilippe still third but now at 19 seconds.
“I actually backed off Doull. He’d started to drift and I was like ‘this is not good’, and he did crash. The bike was drifting right but I squeezed through on the barrier,” Hayter said.
“I did a good sprint. Nizzolo was coming on my left and I could see a white jersey, but I just put it in the biggest gear and went flat-out to the line.”
0 Comments