Tour de Langkawi: Guardini wins stage 2

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Same result, different day. Andrea Guardini (Astana) got the better of Caleb Ewan (Orica-GreenEdge) for the second time in two days to win stage two of the Tour de Langkawi and consolidate his overall lead.

Despite the identical outcome, today’s sprint unfolded differently to yesterday’s, when the Italian had latched onto Ewan’s train and wheel before coming past him. With the Australian youngster reluctant to allow that scenario to pass again, the Orica train was less visible and Guardini latched onto Southest instead, where Alessandro Petacchi was working for Jakub Mareczko. Guardini launched himself from 200 metres and Ewan this time had to respond, coming back at his rival but not by enough. Fellow 20-year-old Mareczko came home in third.

“The other teams were fresher than us to make a sprint but I stayed at the front and I took the best train in the last kilometre, today Southest, and I sprinted really well,” said Guardini.

“Today there was a slippery road and for this I wanted to stay at the front with [Valerio} Agnoli, so I didn’t leave the first 10, 15 positions. Since we only had two riders in the final, we needed to stay in the front because with slippery road, rain, bad visibility, it was difficult for teams today.”

A disappointed Ewan admitted that his top-end speed isn’t where it needs to be having not competed since the Herald Sun Tour at the start of February.

“I’ve had quite a while off racing so it might take me a few days to get back into it,” he said. “I still feel that in my sprint I’m not going as good as I could be so hopefully in the next few days it will come back and I can get quicker.”

He might have a chance to exact revenge on tomorrow’s stage, which includes a cat-2 and a cat-1 climb in the first half of the race – inclines that Guardini is aware will be used against him. “For sure Orica want to make a good start to drop me and maybe Mareczo. I have the jersey and there is the possibility to maintain it to the 6th or 7th stage but we will see tomorrow what happens on that climb.”

How it unfolded

Whereas on the first stage a group went from the start, today it was 25km before the formation of an all-Asian six-man group was away, made up of brothers Adiq and Afiq Othman (Terengganu and National Sports Council of Malaysia), Elchin Asadov (Synergy Baku), Jianpeng Liu (Hengxiang), Patria Rastra (Pegasus Continental), Sea Keong Loh (Malaysia).

They opened up a gap of two minutes and it hovered at that figure for most of the race, with Astana again controlling things from the front of the peloton. In the second half of the race, between the two cat-4 climbs, Loh and Asadov went clear, the latter feeling fresh after refusing to share the workload in the early stages.

The gap went out to two minutes 30 seconds with 20km to go but by 9km the breakaway companions were shaking hands and sitting up, whereupon the sprint teams began to get into position, with Southeast and Tinkoff-Saxo coming to the fore.

Inside the final kilometre the wet conditions caused a nasty crash, with two Sky riders hitting the deck along with the leaders of the mountains and best Asian rider classifications – Kiel Reijnen (UnitedHealthCare) and Guangtong Ma (Hengxiang), who lost his white jersey.

The crash left a mess behind but Guardini wasn’t looking back, already on his way to reinforcing his message that he’s the fastest man in the race.

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