After Etixx-Quickstep and Team Sky had shared out the stage wins for the first six days at the Tour of Britain, the “Gorilla of Rostock”, André Greipel finally broke their joint monopoly with victory in the marathon stage through East Anglia to Ipswich but it was a close-run thing, with at least one image from the photofinish showing Elia Viviani of Sky, the winner in Wrexham and Kelso, fractionally ahead on the line in Princes Street.
With Etixx’s speedsters, Mark Cavendish and Fernando Gaviria, both licking their wounds at home, the Belgian team did not get involved until the final kilometre, and Sky clearly felt they deserved some time out after their riders had spent all the previous day’s stage through the Peak District on the front.
The men in black let Lotto lead the chase behind the day’s all British three-man escape – Alex Dowsett, Gabriel Cullaigh and Graham Briggs – and did not appear at the front of the peloton until the final four kilometres, when the national champion, Peter Kennaugh, led their string to the front.
If Sky have a weakness, it is a tendency to burn up their riders too early in a sprint finish, whereas the tendency now is for teams to hold back as long as possible before launching a full-throated effort in the final couple of kilometres.
Lotto and Marcel Kittel’s Giant are masters of this technique, so it was no surprise to see Greipel’s team-mates Marcel Sieberg and Jens Debusschere tow the German past on the right of the Sky train with 600 metres to go, just before the sharp right turn on to the bridge across the river Orwell. That set up a hectic fight for Greipel’s wheel between Viviani and Mark Renshaw, who is usually Cavendish’s lead-out man at Etixx, but had been promoted in the absence of Cavendish and Gaviria. Sky’s Italian held off the Australian but was forced to go the long way round when Greipel launched his final effort around the right-hand curve into the finish line, and he did well to get dead level with the German.
The days when Greipel played second fiddle to Cavendish at HTC-Columbia, with the Manxman getting the nod for the bigger races, seem a world away now. This was his 16th win of the season – level with his tally for last year – and the total includes four stages in the Tour de France, one in the Giro d’Italia and the Vattenfall Cyclassics, Germany’s biggest one-day race.
Not surprisingly, he is optimistic about his chances in the world championships in Richmond, Virginia in two weeks’ time. He said: “My condition is good, and that’s what I wanted for the worlds, we will have a strong team with myself and John Degenkolb.”
Another man with grounds for optimism is Edvald Boasson Hagen, who is set to take his second victory in the British Tour on Sunday when the race finishes with a circuit of central London that is a spectator’s dream but a taxi-driver’s nightmare, with laps up and down Whitehall, the Strand and Regent Street. Greipel will figure again, so too Viviani, but also in with a chance is Team Wiggins’s Welshman Owain Doull, who has finished between third and sixth on six of the seven stages so far, and took sixth in Ipswich, a model of consistency that merits a victory.
