The final stage of the opening WorldTour race, the Tour Down Under, has arrived, and just like expected, the margins are tight. Something that perhaps wasn’t so expected, however, is the riders holding the top spots and just how narrow the gaps are.
The top two riders, Stephen Williams (Israel-Premier Tech) and stage winner Oscar Onley (dsm-firmenich PostNL) are, in fact, on exactly the same time after the pivotal penultimate stage ending on top of Willunga Hill, which came after four stages that were largely for the sprinters.
Jhonatan Narvaez (Ineos Grenadiers) is next on GC at five seconds back, along with stage 2 winner Isaac Del Toro (UAE Team Emirates), who is fourth. Then, at 13 seconds, it is Julian Alaphilippe (Soudal-QuickStep), Bart Lemmen (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Simon Yates.
The only remaining chance to pull apart and re-shuffle those margins before the end of the six-stage WorldTour race comes on Sunday, with the 128.2km stage that finishes on top of Mount Lofty, a 1.3km ascent with an average gradient of 7.3% and a maximum of 13.3%.
“It’ll be a tough stage, it’ll be hard to control,” said current race leader Williams. “Everyone is still very close there in GC at the top. The top five or six guys are all within a handful of seconds, so I expect a pretty stressful day, but the guys here (Israel-Premier Tech) have such experience and class that I have no worries at all that we will do our best to give everything and try and come away with it.”
Williams claimed the jersey based on stage positions, but while the 27-year-old and his team will be doing everything they can to keep it, others are just as determined to take it away.
Last year, the stage finishing on Mount Lofty delivered slim time gaps, with the top 18 riders all within 9 seconds, and that was with one more ascent of the climb than there will be this year. The peloton will be passing over Mount Lofty twice this year before then taking one more run up to the top to decide the final winner on the summit of the 1.3km ascent with an average gradient of 7.3% and a maximum of 13.3%.
The most obvious threat for Williams is the time-tied Onley. All he needs is a second here or there, perhaps by grabbing one of the intermediate bonuses sprints – which come with bonus time, taking a small gap or perhaps he could deliver by adding another podium to his Tour Down Under results sheet as the top three spots on the stage also come with a time bonus.
The intermediate sprint points are…
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