“It’s strange,” said Katusha sporting director Dmitry Konyshev just over 40 kilometres from the finish of Wednesday’s stage two of the Tour Down Under. “Eight or nine minutes is okay, but 11 minutes is too much. The peloton has left it too late. He’ll hold on by about one minute.”
Less than an hour later, Konyshev had been proved uncannily correct: in what went down as one of the greatest solo rides in Tour Down Under history, Uni SA-Australia rider William Clarke held on to win the undulating stage to Stirling by one minute and two seconds.
Fellow Australians Michael Matthews (Rabobank) and Simon Gerrans (GreenEDGE) completed the podium amid a frenzy of home excitement – but all the plaudits went to 26-year-old Clarke, who broke away with new race leader Martin Kohler (BMC) inside the opening two kilometres.
Having seen the Austrian drop back after picking up maximum bonus seconds at both intermediate sprints, Clarke then defied logic by holding an indecisive peloton at bay.
With the exception of the gutsy Clarke and the calculating Kohler, indecision was indeed the flavour of the day. The bunch already trailed Clarke by 11 minutes as it entered Stirling for the first time, but the gap was exactly the same after the first of three 20km loops that concluded the 148km stage through the picturesque but parched Adelaide hills.
No team seemed willing to lead the chase – not GreenEDGE, whose opening day of the WorldTour was disrupted by that late crash in stage one; not the Lotto-Belisol team of overnight leader Andre Greipel, who saw his battered lead-out man Greg Henderson dropped out the back; not Katusha, the Russian-funded team in whose support car I was following the race alongside affable manager Konyshev.
At the stage start in Lobethal I had asked Katusha’s main sprinter Oscar Freire if he fancied his chances: on paper, the uphill finish in Stirling was definitely suited to a rider of the Spaniard’s stature.
“Yeah, it’s a good finish for me so I will try and stay in front and we will see if it will be possible to win, but it’s not easy,” said Freire.
Even someone as experienced as the 35-year-old three-time world champion surely never envisaged a win for an unheralded Australian prospect who was forced to join a little-known China-based team following the folding of Leopard-Trek last year.
Early (and invariably fruitless) attacks by Uni SA-Australia are par for the course in the Tour Down Under – much like an ill-fated attack by FDJ in the Tour de France.
Freire’s experienced manager Konyshev – himself a former stage winner in all three Grand Tours – certainly didn’t expect Clarke to stay out for the entire duration of the stage. But nor did he do anything to urge his riders to lead the chase – despite Freire’s credentials.
Ensconced within the Katusha team car, I was expecting Konyshev to be on the team radio barking orders in Italian at his multi-national squad. Instead, his demeanour was laid back to the point of indifference. Seemingly like all the other sporting directors, Konyshev never seemed overly concerned with how the day was panning out. Perhaps he, like his colleagues, simply expected Clarke to implode – especially after he was left to do it alone by Kohler.
That Clarke continued plugging away, and that, exhausted, he held on despite one final big effort by the peloton to overturn six minutes on the final 20km loop, goes to show what a talented rider the Tasmanian is. Surely he won’t be plying his trade for the second-tier pro continental Champion System trade team for more than the current season. This emphatic maiden World Tour victory has really put Clarke in the shop window.
It will be food for thought for the newly founded GreenEDGE team, too.
Perhaps Clarke was one that got away? For all their big, fancy gala signings, the Australian team are lying bottom of the rankings, and are so far being positively upstaged by their own youth development squad. Ouch.
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Felix Lowe is an English cycling journalist covering the Tour Down Under for the UK’s CycleSport magazine, for whom he is writing a race diary. This week he is following the race in the team cars of Astana, Katusha, Vacansoleil-DCM and Sky Procycling. He has covered seven years of Grand Tours for Eurosport and writes a regular cycling blog on Eurosport.Yahoo.com called Blazin’ Saddles. He contributes to the VeloNation and Cyclismas websites and can be followed on Twitter @saddleblaze.
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