Tour de Yorkshire: Bouhanni wins stage 2

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The consensus beforehand was that the uphill finish in Harrogate lent itself perfectly to the talents of Nacer Bouhanni (Cofidis), and the Frenchman lived up to his billing with a resounding sprint victory on stage 2 of the Tour de Yorkshire.

By reputation, only Caleb Ewan (Orica-Scott) might have expected to live with Bouhanni on this kind of a finale, and the Australian duly came through to take place second on the stage and move into the blue jersey of race leader, even if his grip is a tenuous one with the tough final stage to Sheffield still to come.

For the second day running, Bouhanni opened his sprint from further out than he would have liked, but the scales were tipped in his favour by the terrain. On Scarborough's windswept seafront on Friday, Bouhanni floundered to finish fourth, but he made light work of Parliament Street's incline on Saturday, punching his way past Jonathan Hivert (Direct Energie) to take the win. Hivert managed to hold on for third place, while Dylan Groenewegen (LottoNL-Jumbo) took fourth ahead of Christopher Lawless (Great Britain).

"I had good legs yesterday too, but it was more tactical and I had to launch my sprint from too far out," Bouhanni said. "Today the sprint was just about having the legs."

Bouhanni's confidence in his strength was obvious. Hivert had looked to surprise the favourites by jumping his way clear with more than 400 metres to go, but where the other sprinters hesitated, Bouhanni moved swiftly and decisively. He cruised up to Hivert and then scorched past him with 200 metres to go.

"I made my big effort with around 350 or 400 metres to go when I saw Jonathan Hivert had attacked. I reacted behind and got back up to him, and then I won," Bouhanni said. As simple as that.

Like on Friday, Ewan made a late charge, and he picked off Hivert in the final 100 metres to take second place, but he never once looked like getting back on terms with Bouhanni. The blue jersey of race leader is perhaps scant consolation given that this was the final sprint opportunity, but Ewan will at least be heartened by his condition ahead of the Giro d’Italia.

"It is disappointing, two second places in a row," Ewan said. "I've been feeling pretty good the last few days and it would have been nice to finish it off with a win but we stuffed it up a bit in the finish and we paid for it in the end."

After LottoNL-Jumbo had controlled affairs for overnight leader Dylan Groenewegen through the stage, Orica-Scott were the most prominent team in the finale, but they surrendered the initiative inside the final kilometre, and Ewan was left with too much ground to recoup on Bouhanni.

"When there was that dip with 600 metres to go, we needed to use the speed we had to keep going, but we hesitated and we got swamped," said Ewan, who carries a lead of two seconds over Bouhanni and Groenewegen into Sunday's final stage, though none of the three fastmen will expect to figure in the shake-up for overall honours considering the severity of the road to Sheffield.

"It's super tough and I think I'd be kidding myself if I thought I could keep the jersey tomorrow," Ewan smiled.

How it unfolded

Tadcaster was divided in two when its 18th century bridge over the River Wharfe partially collapsed during heavy flooding in December 2015. After a 13-month construction process, the visit of the Tour de Yorkshire had the feel of a ceremonial reopening, with the peloton setting out from the northside of town, and crossing the rebuilt bridge, which was overwhelmed with spectators for the occasion.

Just 122 kilometres in length, stage 2 of the Tour de Yorkshire was always likely to be fast and certainly lent itself to a bunch sprint, but there was no shortage of willing attackers in the early kilometres. When a break did establish itself, it featured no fewer than three Yorkshiremen, with Connor Swift (Madison Genesis), James Gullen (JLT Condor) and Harry Tanfield (Bike Channel-Canyon) accompanying Sebastian Mora Vedri (Team Raleigh) in the move.

The quartet established a maximum advantage just shy of four minutes but with Groenewegen's LottoNL-Jumbo team committed to controlling affairs at the head of the peloton, their lead was never allowed to spill out of control. By the midway point, the Dutch squad had already commenced the ineluctable process of clawing back the deficit ahead of the eventual bunch sprint.

The day's lone classified climb, the Côte de Lofthouse, was steep – its average gradient was 11.4% – but mercifully short, and none of the fast men were unduly discommoded by the 1.7-kilometre ascent. Up front, meanwhile, Gullen led Swift over the top, but their buffer over the peloton was down to within two minutes.

There was no particular appetite from the sprinters' teams to sweep up the escapees too far from the finish, of course, and so the quartet's lead guttered at around the 30-second mark deep into the finale, but their hopes were definitively snuffed out with 22 kilometres remaining.

This was the clarion for a fresh round of attacks, and Thomas Voeckler (Direct Energie) responded to the call, punching clear in a short-lived move with Steven Kruijwsijk (LottoNL-Jumbo) and Luke Rowe (Sky). While that attempt was quickly diffused, the tension lingered all the way to Harrogate. Omar Fraile (Dimension Data), Jack Pullar, Dexter Gardias (Bike Channel-Canyon) and Romain Guillemois (Direct Energie) bludgeoned their way off the front shortly afterwards, and they held a lead of 10 seconds over the peloton deep into the finale, before Orica-Scott shut them down.

There were further frissons as the race reached Harrogate, with Julien El Fares (Delko Marseille-KTM) launching a determined late effort that only died inside the final two kilometres. At that juncture, Orica-Scott and Dimension Data seemed to hold strong hands, but the deck was reshuffled on the short descent that preceded the final kick up to the line.

As the road began to climb inside the final 500 metres, Hivert looked to seize the initiative, but on this kind of terrain and on this kind of form, Bouhanni was not to be denied.

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