Team Sky dominated the opening stage of the inaugural Tour de Yorkshire but only after a mid-race change of plan when a crash on a steep descent eliminated their designated leader Ben Swift. As the local man was taken to hospital with a shoulder injury, his team-mates Lars Petter Nordhaug and Philip Deignan stepped up. Nordhaug outsprinted a five-rider group who could well be the top finishers overall when the race ends in Leeds on Sunday.
The pile-up came as the race descended from the moors into Grosmont, with some 50km still to race. A sudden, brief shower made the road slippery. Sky were leading the chase behind two escapees, the Frenchman Perrig Quéméneur and the Belgian Tim Declercq; Declercq lost control on a tight right-hand bend and went up the hedge, spinning head over heels before getting back on his bike.
Half a dozen riders went down in the peloton, with Swift and Ian Boswell among them, as well as the promising Irishman Eddie Dunbar of the British NFTO team. “It was really slippy,” said Deignan, who was among the Sky riders at the head of the string. “Normally the roads here are quite abrasive but that was real shiny, the shower came on real quick just as we got to it, and it was a 20% descent so it was probably the worst moment for it to happen.”
Briefly, the peloton split but then there was a hiatus as the field tried to work out who was involved. Unlike the Tour de France, there are no radios in this race to link riders and team staff, so Swift’s team-mates had to wait until it was obvious he was not going to rejoin them. “We kind of waited for 10 or 15km and when it was clear he wasn’t coming back we started following the attacks,” a team-mate said.
After the race left Whitby, it was the BMC team who set the pace but after a 15-rider group had pulled away, Deignan forced the decisive split on the lengthy, steep ascent from Robin Hood’s Bay, with 27.5km remaining; only Nordhaug, the Beijing Olympic road race champion Samuel Sánchez and the perennial star of the Tour de France Thomas Voeckler were able to hold him, along with a surprise package in the first-year French professional Stéphane Rossetto.
That gave Sky numerical superiority but they were up against two clever and rapid finishers in Sánchez and Voeckler, evening up the odds somewhat. However, after circumnavigating Scarborough Castle and then heading north along the sea front, it was Nordhaug who proved the fastest by a length from the Frenchman – with Deignan also raising his hands in the air as they crossed the line – to become the first wearer of the blue and yellow leader’s jersey. The other 10 members of the initial split finished 1min 10sec behind, with promising young British cyclists such as the Welshman Scott Davies and the Lancastrian Richard Handley holding the pace alongside seasoned campaigners such as Steve Cummings and Sky’s David López.
This was a surprisingly difficult stage, with the field spread over almost 17 minutes, and Nordhaug’s record as a mountain biker can have done him no harm when it came to negotiating the succession of steep little climbs in the moors, which had forced Sky for one to fit lower gears than usual.
The 31-year-old was a member of Sky when they were founded in 2010 and returned to the British team this year after two years with the Dutch team Belkin. Unobtrusively, the former mountain biker – one of his last mountain bike wins was the Norwegian Birkebeinerrittet in 2006 – has built a respectable palmarès, with the highlight a victory in the Montreal Grand Prix in 2012.
While the chill in the air was more January than July, the legacy of last year’s Tour de France Grand Depart was all there: the huge crowds, the bunting, the painted bikes in every gateway – are there any old bikes left in Yorkshire that have not been dolloped with yellow and used for decoration? – but the tough roads did for Marcel Kittel, the winner of last year’s Tour de France stage in Harrogate.
The German was among the early stragglers and retired in Danby, 67km from the finish, blaming a lack of racing because of his recent health problems. Sir Bradley Wiggins found the going tough as well, finishing almost 15 minutes back.
Saturday’s 174km leg from Selby to York is easier on paper but if a decent breeze blows over the wolds it could spring some surprises.
