Tour Down Under: Bevin backs up to win stage 2 and take overall lead
At first, CCC Team's Patrick Bevin wasn't given much credit for having won stage 2 of the 2019 Tour Down Under in Angaston on Wednesday. Almost everyone had assumed that the bright-orange-clad rider who had got the better of Lotto Soudal's Caleb Ewan and three-time world champion Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe) in the race for the line was CCC's designated sprinter Jakub Mareczko.
It took a couple of minutes for the news to filter through: Bevin, who had taken enough bonus seconds while in a breakaway on Tuesday's opening stage to put himself into third overall going into the second day, was the day's winner, and the 10-second stage winner's bonus had also been enough to give him the race lead, deposing overnight leader Elia Viviani (Deceuninck-QuickStep), who could only finish seventh.
"The team was riding for Mareczko," Bevin confirmed, "but I had a free role. They were going to try to lead him out, but obviously with me chasing the GC here, I had to stay up there and not lose time.
"We knew it was a tough finish," he said. "We'd 'reconned' it, so it was a case of, 'If it happens, it happens,' but the finish was really tough. It was on for the last five kilometres - full gas - because otherwise the day had been quite easy, so it just became about looking after what I could do for me, and I happened to pick up a teammate [Fran Ventoso] after it got separated [due to the crash] and that was a big help to deliver me in the last kilometre."
Bevin explained that it wasn't really until with two kilometres to go that he thought he might have a chance.
"The road kind of dragged up there, and I got myself into a really good position, on the shoulder of the road, out of the wind," he said. "Just as the crash happened, I was starting to move up and come around, and then the Astana rider, Luis Leon Sanchez, went off the front, and so I thought I'd try to pick him up and use him as a springboard, as I knew that in a straight sprint I wasn't going to be able to beat those other guys.
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