Sam Watson sprinted to third place on a soaking wet second stage at the Tour of Britain.<\/p>\n
The British national champion hit out early inside the final kilometre in Stowmarket but would be overhauled at the line, with Olav Kooij (Visma | Lease a Bike) taking back to back stage victories.<\/p>\n
Time bonuses saw Watson elevated to third place overall on a tricky day, which saw wind and rain pound the peloton.<\/p>\n
The INEOS Grenadiers stuck together well but were unable to split the race apart on narrow, sheltered roads. Thymen Arensman was unlucky to be caught up in a crash with 2km to go, and was eventually able to finish without time loss thanks to the three-kilometre rule.<\/p>\n
Once again the likes of Geraint Thomas, Ben Swift, AJ August and Lucas Hamilton got through a lot of work on the day, with August caught behind the crash late on after recovering from a puncture.<\/p>\n
Watson sits 16 seconds back on Kooij, with the race set to move into slightly hillier terrain on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Watson sprinted to third place on a soaking wet second stage at the Tour of Britain. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-112737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}