Arnaud Demare (FDJ.fr) repeated his victory from yesterday at today’s 2nd stage of the Tour de l’Eurometropole.
In another frantic sprint finish, Jens Debsusschere (Lotto-Belisol) placed 2nd with Theo Bos (Belkin) in 3rd place. Once again Andreas Stauff was the highest placed rider from Team MTN-Qhubeka p/b Samsung in 14th place.
Just as was the case yesterday, a 5 rider break would go clear in early part of the stage but the nature of the course lent itself to a bunch sprint. With FDJ.fr controlling most of the day and then some assistance from a few other teams, the break was caught with 40km’s to go. The run in to the finish was rather technical and a few crashes would take place before the eventual bunch kick.
Rider – Andreas Stauff
The stage started again with a very fast first hour of racing. A breakaway went just before the 3 climbs of the day and FDJ controlled the peloton. It was quiet for a while but at the feed zone Belkin and then GreenEdge tried to split the peloton with an attack, but there was unfortunately not enough wind to cause real damage to the bunch.
We finished with 3 laps which were very dangerous with a lot of traffic islands and things like that. There was at least one big crash that happened just behind me and they said nearly 30 riders went down. In the last km the road went from 3 to 1 lane and I managed to squeeze in there in the last moment but couldn’t take the last corner at 400m to go at full speed. I had more than 73kph in the sprint but lost maybe too much in that corner.
I’m glad to get through the stage safely and now i’m really looking forward to some aggressive racing during the following stages and at Paris-Tours next weekend.
Full results here: Results
Tour de l’Eurometropole (Belgium) – (2-5 Oct/UCI 2.1) Team Lineup
Gerald Ciolek (GER)
Jaco Venter (RSA)
Martin Wesemann (RSA)
Johann van Zyl (RSA)
Nicolas Dougall (RSA)
Ignatas Konovalovas (LTU)
Linus Gerdemann (GER)
Andy Stauff (GER)
Stage Profiles Overview
Stage 1 – 2 October (191km)
Stage 2 – 3 October (171km)
Stage 3 – 4 October (174km)
Stage 4 – 5 October (155km)
