Matej Mohorič (Bahrain Victorious) unexpectedly clung onto the lead in the Tour de Pologne on Thursday but is now tied on time with João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates) after the stage 6 time trial through the streets of Katowice, won by Mattia Cattaneo (Soudal-QuickStep).
Cattaneo’s victory in the 16.6km time trial, his first since a stage of the 2021 Tour of Luxemburg, saw the Italian win by 13 seconds over Almeida, with Geraint Thomas (Ineos Grenadiers) in third, 14 seconds adrift.
With one flat stage remaining, the overall now is poised on a knife edge as Mohorič continues to lead the race.
However, with Almeida just hundredths of seconds behind and Michal Kwiatkowski (Ineos Grenadiers) in third place at 14 seconds, the GC battle could now come down to the fight for time bonuses on the last stage into Krakow.
“Today I had really good legs and held back in the first part,” said Mohorič, who finished 11th on the stage and limited his losses to 12 seconds on Almeida. “But then when I heard I was just 18 seconds back on Kwiato’ I thought ‘Wow!’ and I just gave it my best from there.
“I knew the second part was harder so I made sure I had enough energy for that and it was enough to hold on all the way to the finish and keep the leader’s jersey. I’m very happy.”
Cattaneo, for his part, was keen to savour his first victory at this level, and he recalled his teammate Fabio Jakobsen’s life-threatening crash in Katowice in 2020.
“This is my first WorldTour win, so it’s something very special. I’ve done a lot of work on my time trialling and normally I’d get fifth, sixth or seventh, so to get a victory like this is something great,” Cattaneo said.
“Here in this city, there’s also something special because I was also here in exactly the same finish when Fabio crashed, so this was also something that pushed me today. I wanted to do something special.”
How it unfolded
Switzerland’s former national TT champion Joel Suter (Tudor) set the first benchmark time of 20:06 on the short course in Katowice consisting largely of long, mostly broad straightaways, gentle rises and descents, and only a handful of technical, sometimes cobbled sections.
Under leaden skies which thankfully did not give way to actual rainfall, Irish TT champ Ryan Mullen (Bora-Hansgrohe) then took the provisional best time under 20 minutes for the first time, clocking 19:55 and averaging a sizzling 50.008 kmh.
Michael Hepburn (Jayco-AIUIa) then punched a sizeable 12-second hole through Mullen’s time, though, and in turn the Australian was notably upstaged by young New Zealander Finn Fisher-Black (UAE Team Emirates), who shifted the bar up several notches, to 19:26. But that was followd by a notable effort from Geraint Thomas (Ineos Grenadiers), already 1.7 seconds faster than Fisher-Black at the intermediate checkpoint, and who held his advantage to cross the line two seconds faster.
Tim Wellens (UAE Team Emirates) gave Thomas a good run for his money, only finishing two seconds slower, but it was Cattaneo who actually outshone the Welshman, first by four seconds at the intermediate checkpoint and then sweeping through the final chicane at speed to claim the top spot by a whopping 14 seconds.
Michal Kwiatkowski’s time, two seconds slower than Cattaneo at the 8km checkpoint, was a reminder that the Ineos Grenadiers rider is not the Polish champion in this discipline by chance. In contrast, Almeida's time, six seconds slower than the Italian, suggested that the Portuguese rider might not be on a stunning day. As for Mohorič, after losing 18 seconds to Cattaneo at the first split and 12 to Almeida, the Slovenian was clutching onto his lead by his fingertips.
But rather than Almeida broadening the gap in the second half, Mohorič managed to limit the damage. Digging deep on the series of small rises and descents that followed through the streets of Katowice, the Slovenian sped into the finishing straight in the shadow of the Spodek stadium with his time loss on Almeida maintained at 12 seconds. As a result, his overall advantage was thus reduced to a few hundredths of a second, but Mohorič still remained in yellow for a fifth straight day.
This dramatic turn of events, with Mohorič just managing to fend off a TT expert like Almeida overall, means that the battle between the top two on GC will now be fought out on what is usually a largely ceremonial final flat stage in to Krakow. Pologne's GC has often been decided by seconds in the past, but this could prove to be the tightest GC battle since central Europe's top cycling event joined the WorldTour in 2007.
Results
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