Mathieu van der Poel didn\u2019t need long to find his racing legs at the Tour de Luxembourg. Just like two years ago, he\u2019s using the five-day stage race as prep for the road worlds in Montreal at the end of the month. He\u2019s hoping to get his rainbow jersey back (well, on the road, as he has a closetful from \u2018cross.)<\/p>\n
Stage 1 of the Tour de Luxembourg<\/p>\n
The Dutch ace won Wednesday\u2019s opening stage of the Tour de Luxembourg after attacking on the C\u00f4te de Stafelter, briefly getting clear with 21-year-old German Eike Behrens before the peloton pulled them back. But did the former world road champ say, \u201cWell, I guess that was my shot, I\u2019ll just roll it in\u201d? No sir, he did not. He said, \u201cHold my Heineken,\u201d and let\u2019s try that again.<\/p>\n
Van der Poel had plenty left for the uphill finish, beating Pierre Gautherat and Marijn van den Berg to the line.<\/p>\n
The 157.7-km stage finished with a nasty combination of climbs, including the 2.4-km Stafelter at seven per cent, before a final 550 metres averaging 8.8 per cent in Luxembourg City.<\/p>\n
After the breakaway was swallowed up, Lidl-Trek moved to the front on the Stafelter. Van der Poel then made his move, opening a gap before Behrens managed to bridge across.<\/p>\n
The pair reached the top together, but the gap to the bunch was only about 15 seconds. Van der Poel kept pushing while Behrens declined to contribute, but their escape was eventually shut down by Soudal Quick-Step and Visma- Lease a Bike.<\/p>\n
That left Van der Poel with one more job. Gautherat launched his sprint early and briefly got clear, but<\/p>\n
Van der Poel responded and powered past the Frenchman to take the win.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a good sign for the Alpecin-Premier Tech rider, who also won this stage last year and would go on to take the points and second overall.<\/p>\n
He also had help from Toronto\u2019s Noah Ramsay, who usually rides for the Conti team, but has several times these past few years, \u201cridden up\u201d on certain occasions, just like Toronto\u2019s Canadian\/U.S. dual citizen Ashlin Barry on Visma-Lease a Bike. (Sort of something to have two Canucks in the same city riding for two of the biggest teams in the world, eh?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mathieu van der Poel didn\u2019t need long to find his racing legs at the Tour de Luxembourg. Just…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":898283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":["post-898282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=898282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/898283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=898282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=898282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=898282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}