Mads Pedersen brightened the race up with a flash of rainbow colours in a close sprint with Pascal Ackermann and Davide Ballerini. The Danish rider took his first win as a World Champion in Zabrze and became the leader of the General Classification, while Pascal Ackermann chased him to the line, finishing only four seconds behind.<\/p>\n
Today’s stage was enlivened by today\u2019s fugitives, Maciej Paterski and Julius Van Den Berg, who were caught at only 16 km from the finish by the peloton preparing for the final sprint. The sprinters\u2019 trains saw Trek-Segafredo, BORA-hansgrohe and Bahrain-McLaren as the main contenders up to the last 500 meters, where Mads Pedersen, Pascal Ackermann and a brave Davide Ballerini were the key players in a sprint fought to the very last centimeter. Pedersen was first across the finish line, and the World Champion can now frame a picture of his first victory in the rainbow jersey.<\/p>\n
Julius Van Den Berg secured his leadership in the mountain classification, while Jasper Philipsen now leads the sprinter classification. The prize for the most active rider goes to Maciej Paterski.<\/p>\n
Winner\u2019s quote: \u201cIt\u2019s super nice to win and I want to dedicate this victory to Fabio after the horrible crash of yesterday; he deserves a speedy recovery and a quick return to life and cycling, so this victory is definitely for him. On a personal side it\u2019s super nice to come back to racing, starting with a victory, showing off the jersey. I haven\u2019t had a lot of opportunities to show the stripes so I think it was nice to do it today. It\u2019s really horrible what happened yesterday, no one deserved it; of course it touched the whole peloton but we have to keep racing and doing our best. I hope for the best for Fabio and now I\u2019ll return to the guys to enjoy the victory and we’ll see what happens in the next days. It\u2019s getting harder and harder, there will be more climbs and that\u2019s definitely not a thing for me. I\u2019ll just enjoy the victory and the yellow jersey tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jasper Philipsen, sprint jersey holder: \u201cI think everybody was a little shocked about what happened yesterday, and today the stage was quite easy in the beginning, so I think a lot of people had time to think about what happened yesterday and almost couldn\u2019t take in that something terrible like this happened. In the final it was just business as usual again; the sprinter tried to line up, my team did a really good job today but I am a bit disappointed with myself. I couldn\u2019t really get to sprinting speed today and that\u2019s why I\u2019m disappointed, but let\u2019s hope we can show what we can do this week in the next races here. Sometimes it\u2019s all about when you see the barriers you just try to quickly think about something else and focus on the day – not always easy, but we just need to go on and try to keep safe and ride for the best result possible. The sprint jersey shows consistency, even if of course today I was aiming for more, but also a long training period: I worked well on my sprint, but am a little bit disappointed that I couldn\u2019t show that. Let\u2019s hope I can prove my potential and do something good during the week.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today the thoughts of the whole group were with Fabio Jakobsen, who underwent intricate surgery during the night. There were many displays of affection for the Belgian rider: on the podium Julius Van Den Berg showed a message for his friend and Davide Ballerini said he sprinted for his teammate. The Italian, who finished third in Zabrze, explained:<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a tough day for all of us as Fabio was in our minds the entire day. I really wanted to get a good result for him, but it\u2019s not easy with these strong competitors. I\u2019m sure Fabio would have won it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mads Pedersen brightened the race up with a flash of rainbow colours in a close sprint with Pascal Ackermann and … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":23035,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n