Boasson Hagen sprints to win in Bayern opening stage

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Edvald Boasson Hagen of Team Sky won the mass sprint of the first stage of the Tour of Bavaria. The Norwegian narrowly beat Andre Schulze of CCC Polsat Polkowice, with Garmin-Cervelo's Heinrich Haussler placing third.

It was Boasson Hagen's first win of the year, and he took over the general lead as well.

“I’m really happy to finally get my win,” Boasson Hagen said. “I haven’t had much luck this season so the victory allowed me to get a lot of frustration out after my recent setbacks.  Today everything worked perfectly and the team were brilliant, I just finished off the hard work they had done for me.

“Hopefully that’s the end of my bad luck now. I still don’t think I am quite back to my best, but I’ve been doing some really good training and this result will give me confidence for the summer because I have proved that I am strong.

“It was pretty clear-cut at the end and I took the victory by a good bike length. CJ just dropped me off and then I opened up and thankfully no-one came past me.”<

The longest stage ever in the history of the race, 223.2km, got off to an early start. Equally early was the formation of the escape group of the day. Jaroslav Marycz (Saxo Bank-SunGard), Markus Eichler (NSP), Sander Armee (Topsport Vlaanderen), Maxime Bouet (AG2R) and Fabian Wegmann (Leopard Trek) quickly built up a sizeable lead on the rolling course.

They held a lead of up to 8:15, but about halfway through the stage, the gap started falling. The two ranked climbs in the last third of the race did their part to cut the lead too.

But the sprinters' teams were determined to have their day, and by the time the field entered the two laps of the closing 8km circuit course, the gap had fallen to less than a minute. Eichler had already fallen back, but the remaining four fought hard to retain their narrow gap.

With only 3km to go, however, they were caught, setting up the expected mass sprint finish.

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