Tour de Langkawi: Ewan wins stage 6 bunch sprint

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Caleb Ewan (Orica-GreenEdge) secured his second victory at the Tour de Langkawi, sprinting away from Jakub Marecxko (Southeast) and Chris Sutton (Sky) at the end of the 96km-long sixth stage from Maran to Karak.

The 20-year-old Australian took advantage of his teammates’ efforts in the final kilometres before tucking in behind Mareczko and surging past him on the left-hand side of the road as it curved to the right at 150 metres.

He holds onto the race lead and, with triple stage winner Andrea Guardini coming home in fifth, also tightens his grip on the blue points jersey.

“We made a few mistakes in the past few stages but we really nailed it today so it feels really good to get the win,” said Ewan. “We were really strong in the last 5km and tried something different, staying more out of the bunch so it was easier for me to sit in. The guys were just so strong in the last 5km and they did it perfectly.

“It would be really nice to bring home a jersey from my first international tour as a professional, so that would be a really good outcome. We came here with the aim of winning one stage and now we’ve won two, and have the blue jersey, so we have really exceeded our expectations.”

Tomorrow’s penultimate stage is the queen stage of the race and culminates with the first category climb of Fraser’s Hill. It was originally set to finish atop the hors-category Genting Highlands but the finish was moved on the eve of the race due to the heavy machinery and construction work taking place up there. With Fraser’s Hill being a considerably easier alternative, and after Ewan’s show of strength on the first-category climb mid-way through stage three, there is the slim possibility that he might be able to hold onto the race lead until Kuala Lumpur.

“I’ll hope for it and if it happens it happens,” he said, “but if it doesn’t, then I never came into the tour expecting it, so I’m not going to put any pressure on myself tomorrow.

“For me to win the yellow jersey or keep it tomorrow the race is going to have to go my way and I’ll have to have really good legs. I know it’s probably not really a possibility but I’ll go in and I’ll go hard and we’ll see what happens.”

How it unfolded

Since the breakaway was allowed to survive to the end yesterday, and given the length of today’s stage, a bunch sprint was almost inevitable. That didn’t stop a group of four escaping from kilometre zero, made up of Simone Andreetta (Bardiani-CSF), Enver Asanov (Synergy-Baku), Soon Yeong Kwon (KSPO) and Xiaolong Sun (Giant-Champion Sysytem).

They quickly opened up a lead of 1.30 but Astana were on the front of the peloton and made sure it never extended out any further. With 40km left to race Orica-GreenEdge started to do some work and with 20km to go the lead was down to a minute.

They were caught inside the final 10km and the sprinters teams started to position themselves, Tinkoff-Saxo setting a high pace in the final 4km. Alessandro Petacchi and Southeast hit the front coming into the final kilometre and Ewan knew that Mareczko’s wheel was the one to take, coming round to win by a considerable margin.

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