British sprinter Mark Cavendish leads the Tirreno-Adriatico after his Omega Pharma-Quick Step team won a time trial to open the weeklong cycling race on Wednesday.
Omega clocked 20 minutes, 13 seconds over the flat 18.5km route from Donoratico to San Vincenzo.
It was an identical start from last year, when Cavendish also took the lead with an Omega win.
Photo: EPA
“The team is stronger than last year,” Cavendish said.
“We went fast, we went hard, but the faster you go in the team time trial the easier it feels. We were really smooth with the pace the whole way. You almost feel like you didn’t go fast enough when it’s like that,” he added.
One of the greatest sprinters of all time, Cavendish has had a slow start to this season, with his only individual win coming in a stage of the Tour of Algarve last month.
Three-time time trial world champion Tony Martin was again the main engine behind Omega’s success, which should benefit Michal Kwiatkowski and Rigoberto Uran, who are aiming for the overall win.
“We tested the route several times, and nobody had a big ego and wanted to stand out,” Cavendish said. “Obviously Tony is very strong at time trialing, but nobody — not even him — wanted to do too much. We all worked together as well as possible and it went great.”
Orica Greenedge finished second, 11 seconds behind, and Movistar — featuring Tour de France runner-up Nairo Quintana — was third, 18 seconds behind.
Alberto Contador’s Tinkoff Saxo placed fourth, 24 seconds behind. Sky, with Bradley Wiggins and Richie Porte, was sixth, 27 seconds behind.
Porte was added to Sky’s squad last week when Tour de France winner Chris Froome announced that he would sit out the race due to a back injury.
Stage 2 yesterday was scheduled to be a 166km leg from San Vincenzo to Cascina that sets up well for sprinters like Cavendish.
“I have a team that’s really set up well for the sprints,” Cavendish said. “And we’re strengthened by the arrivals of [Mark] Renshaw and [Alessandro] Petacchi.”
Including a couple of uphill stages, the race ends on Tuesday with an individual time trial in San Benedetto del Tronto.
Many riders use it as a warmup for the Milan-San Remo classic, which is slated for March 23.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier