A last-ditch effort in the final kilometre of the windswept summit finish at Haytor behind the stage six winner Wout Poels of Team Sky left Steve Cummings in the yellow jersey of the Tour of Britain, within reach of the biggest stage-race win of his career, but with the overall standings finely poised. The 35-year-old will start Saturday morning’s 15km time trial in Bristol with Tom Dumoulin of the Netherlands 49sec behind and Rohan Dennis of Australia at 51sec, which is sufficiently close for all three men to hope that overall victory might be theirs.
On paper the Tour de France stage winner and Olympic time trial silver medallist Dumoulin or the former Hour record holder Dennis have stronger time trial credentials than Cummings, but the 2005 team pursuit world champion is a far better than average rider against the watch, finishing 15th in last year’s world championship and 12th in the Pont d’Arc time trial stage of this year’s Tour de France. He also won the time trial stage en route to taking the Tour of the Mediterranean in 2014.
Cummings went into the Devon stage in second place, 6sec behind the Belgian Julien Vermote, winner on Monday in Kendal, but the Etixx rider cracked halfway up the 5.7km climb to the finish high on Dartmoor after Poels’s team-mates, led by Ian Stannard and Danny van Poppel, had set a searing pace once the peloton turned right on the outskirts of Exeter and headed westwards towards the moor.
Dumoulin and Dennis had to dislodge the Wirral rider to have any chance on Saturday; it was their first joint attack 4km out which broke Vermote but, as he so often does, Cummings bided his time. He joined the pair briefly as they swept out of the lower wooded section on to the moor with 2.5km to the line, before slipping off the pace again a few hundred metres later as Poels began to put on the pressure.
Cummings has acknowledged that he is not quite in his best climbing form, having put on a couple of kilogrammes in weight since the Tour de France, and his strategy was clear: to remain within reach of Dennis and Dumoulin in the knowledge that he had opened up a one-minute cushion on the pair en route to Kendal.
Critically, with the Dimension Data rider 50 metres or so behind them, Dumoulin, Dennis and Poels began to mark each other as the final kilometre approached, and it was Poels who finally attacked to take the third British stage win of his career, a repeat of his victory last year on Hartside Fell. The lanky Dutchman, winner of a stage in Teignmouth in his pre-Sky days, was not a threat overall, having dropped far behind in the Lake District.
Behind the Dutchman – who was unable to take his hands off the bars to make a two-handed victory salute due to the gusty wind – Dumoulin, Dennis and Cummings fought individual battles to the finish line. Dennis finished 6sec behind Poels, Dumoulin 8sec, both taking time bonuses which could prove critical if Saturday goes down to the wire, while Cummings dropped 20sec, but maintained his rhythm right to the line, his face pouring sweat.
It was enough to put him in the yellow jersey, but Dumoulin and Dennis are close enough to hope, meaning that Saturday’s 15km against the watch around Clifton Down will be a more pressured outing than his warm-up for this, a club five-mile event on Merseyside a couple of weeks ago. If the time trial is tight, the race may finally be decided by the time bonuses on offer in the afternoon’s circuit race around six laps of the time trial course, and during Sunday’s closing leg in central London.
