Matteo Trentin held off Daniele Bennati in a final sprint to narrowly win the sixth stage of the Tour de Suisse on Thursday as Omega Pharma-QuickStep teammate Tony Martin retained his overall lead.
Trentin, who was led out perfectly by Martin in the final kilometer, attacked with 200m to go and edged out Bennati by half-a-wheel.
Francesco Gavazzi was third on the 193km trek from Buren an der Aare to Delemont, beating Ben Swift to make it an all-Italian podium. Martin retained his six-second advantage over Dutch cyclist Tom Dumoulin. Peter Sagan of Slovakia was 10 seconds behind the German, heading into Friday’s individual time trial.
The tour ends tomorrow.
After four stages the race returned to the mountains with four categorized climbs.
Vladimir Isaichev, Michael Albasini, Jacopo Guarnieri and Jacobus Venter broke free early on and had an advantage of 4 minutes, 34 seconds heading into the first climb of the day, the category one Grand Chaumont.
That lead dropped to less than three minutes at the top, but the quartet pushed their advantage out again on the descent. They were caught with 37km remaining by the Team Sky-driven peloton.
Sagan attacked on the final climb and managed to open up a gap with a great ride on the descent. He had victory in sight as he led with Marcus Burghardt with 3km left.
However, Sky brought the riders back together and Martin took over the front, leading the race into the final kilometer and causing a split in the peloton.
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