Tour of Britain: Wout van Aert caught in final metres as Rasmus Tiller wins stage 7 reduced sprint

Image 1 of 9

Rasmus Tiller (Uno-X Pro Cycling) won a reduced group sprint to take the stage 7 victory at the Tour of Britain in Gloucester. 

The small group charged to the line, catching late-race attacker and overall leader Wout van Aert (Jumbo-Visma) with 600 metres to go. Tiller was the fastest sprinter in the group, taking the win ahead of Danny van Poppel (Bora-Hansgrohe) and Stephen Williams (Great Britain).

"I feel really good. The first six stages were all about the bunch sprints. Today, we knew that the parcours suited us well. I'm really happy to get the win,"  Tiller said.

"Wout went away on the steep climb, and I didn't have the power to follow and needed to pace a little bit, and we managed to come back. In the sprint, it was a lot of tactics in the last 10km, and Wout was alone out front. We knew he was really strong, so we knew we had to pull to bring him back and to do a good lead-out so I'm happy that I managed to win."

Van Aert continues to lead the overall classification with three seconds over Van Poppel and Tiller as the Tour of Britain heads into the finale stage 8 from Margam Country Park to Caerphilly on Sunday.

How it unfolded

The seventh stage at the Tour of Britain was 170.0km from Tewkesbury to Gloucester the started with an ascent over the category 2 Winchcombe Hill (1.8km at 9.4%), then descended into a long stretch through the valley before tackling an intermediate sprint at Dursley and over the category 2 Crawley Hill (1.7km at 8.1%). Into the final kilometres, the peloton went over one last uncategorised 2.2km ascent with an average gradient of 5.7% before descending into Gloucester.

An action-packed start to the day led to a breakaway of two over the Mark Donovan (Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team) and Ben Turner (Ineos Grenadiers) over the first ascent of the stage. The pair were then joined by Ryan Christensen (Bolton Equities Black Spoke), Liam Johnston (Trinity Racing) and Abram Stockman (TDT-Unibet Cycling Team).

Uno-X Pro Cycling initially set the pace at the front of the field, but as the breakaway gained more time, Jumbo-Visma moved forward with their overall race leader, Wout van Aert, and with some help from Movistar.

As the race passed through the intermediate sprint in Dursley with 29km to go, the time gap dropped to under one minute. Donovan picked up the points in Dursey and the points over Crawley Hill.

The small, shattered groups behind the breakaway merged back together, but there were only roughly 25 riders left in the main field in pursuit of the breakaway riders.

Van Aert saw his opportunity to surge over the uncategorised ascent with 11km to go, where he caught the breakaway riders. Donovan and Turner were able to hang on to Van Aert's pace as Stephen William (Israel-Premier Tech) bridged across to form a new group of four.

A chase behind the quartet included Danny van Poppel and Nils Politt (Bora-Hansgrohe, Gregor Mühlberger and Gonzalo Serrano (Movistar Team), Damien Howson (Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team), and Zeb Kyffin (Saint Piran).  However, Uno X Pro Cycling dragged the chase group back into the fold with 5km to the finish.

Sensing the gap closing down on the breakaway, Van Aert attacked from the breakaway and pulled away with 3km to go. He built his lead out to five seconds, but as Uno X and Bora-Hansgrohe pulled a reduced field into the last kilometre, Van Aert's gap was cut to just three seconds, and he was caught inside 600 metres to go.

Results

Results powered by FirstCycling