Hard work throughout the day by Cofidis on stage 4 of the Tour of Turkey was rewarded with a bunch sprint victory for their fastman Stanisław Aniołkowski.
Modern Adventure’s Riley Pickrell took second on the short, rugged trek from Marmaris to Fethiye, with Davide Persico in third (MBH Bank CSB Telecom Fort).
The winner of Turkey’s opening two sprint stages, Belgium’s Tom Crabbe (Flanders-Baloise), was swamped on one side of the long dash along the seafront, and Fernando Gaviria (Caja Rural Seguros RCA) launched his sprint too early. But Aniołkowski timed it perfectly and came from late behind Pickrell to cross the line with half a bikelength to spare.
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Whilst the Polish racer could celebrate his first win since a stage of the Tour of Hellas nearly three years ago, overall leader Iván Parra (Equipo Kern Pharma) remained safely in the lead for a second straight day.
“I really waited for this for so long, all the times top ten or top five, so I would like to say a big thank you to my team, they did today an amazing job to make the race a bit harder. For me, that’s a bit better because I’m climbing a bit better than the other guys,” Aniołkowski said after the stage.
For the first hour, barring a couple of very short-lived attacks, the peloton largely remained together, rocketing along at an average speed of over 50kph.
One interesting seven-rider move emerged at the halfway point with around 65km to go, sparked by Polti-VisitMalta’s Dario Belletta and including young American Jonah Killy (Tartoletto-Isorex), and reaching an advantage of over two minutes.
However, Alpecin-Premier Tech and Equipo Kern Pharma’s driving pace behind them for Parra ensured the group was kept on a narrow leash, and shortly after the summit of the one classified ascent, a grindingly long third-category climb peaking out with 37km to go, the last two of the seven breakaways were all reeled in.
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