Australia’s newest cycling star Caleb Ewan unleashed a withering turn of speed to claim the opening stage of the Tour Down Under in South Australia yesterday.
Ewan, 21, burst onto the world cycling scene last year with a series of strong results, including winning a stage in the Vuelta a Espana.
He showed his class yesterday, biding his time perfectly to overwhelm the rest of the peloton and win in 3 hours, 24.13 minutes.
Photo: EPA
The Orica-GreenEdge rider finished a clear bike length ahead of fellow Australian Mark Renshaw of Team Dimension Data and Cannondale’s Wouter Wippert of the Netherlands.
“I felt really good all day and the team obviously backed me all day because they rode at the front from the start,” Ewan said. “I’m just so happy I could finish it off for them.”
The 130.8km opening stage from Prospect, just north of Adelaide, to the Barossa Valley town of Lyndoch went ahead in oppressive heat that tested the cyclists in their first race of the year.
Photo: AFP
Temperatures reached 40?C throughout the day, while riders also had to deal with strong winds and high humidity.
The first stage had a familiar feel to it when Team UniSA’s Sean Lake attacked at the 4km mark, a standard tactic at the Tour Down Under from the local team made up of promising Australian riders.
Lake was joined at the front by France’s Alexis Gougeard of AG2R La Mondiale and Dutchman Martin Keizer of Lotto NL-Jumbo, with the trio breaking away to lead by more than two minutes.
However, the peloton, led by Orica-GreenEdge’s Michael Hepburn, never let them get away and slowly began to reel them in.
Keizer was dropped with 38km to go and Gougeard gave up at the 22km mark, but Lake persevered until inside the final 10km when he was finally caught.
First Team Sky and then African outfit Team Dimension Data came to the front to try and set the race up for their respective sprinters, Ben Smith and Renshaw, but Ewan glided up on the long finishing straight and with 50m to go he changed gear and surged to the lead for an emphatic victory.
“You have to be super conservative because the sprinters are so fast these days, it’s usually the guy with the freshest legs and the strongest team who wins,” said Ewan, who will wear the leader’s ocher jersey today.
“It’s a really proud moment for me. I’ve never led a WorldTour race and to lead my first one in my own country is a real honor for me,” he said.
Today’s 132km second stage starts in Adelaide and finishes in the picturesque town of Stirling, a ride expected to favor the general classification hopefuls rather than the sprinters.
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