Dylan Groenewegen wins another Tour of Britain stage but Trentin leads

The results sheets showed a second stage win in three days for Dylan Groenewegen in a bunch sprint but this was far from routine. While all eyes were on the Dutch prodigy Mathieu van der Poel on a technical uphill finish which played completely to his strengths, his compatriot Groenewegen – very much one of the flat-earth brethren – struck out surprisingly early to take the honours in Newcastle, though the green race leader’s jersey remains on the shoulders of the stage two winner, Matteo Trentin.

All the leaders looked wrong-footed by the stiff little climb of Grey Street, with a sweeping descent to the river beforehand, and a couple of little chicanes to set the nerves jangling. It was less the usual red mist, rather the fog on the Tyne. As the frontrunners gathered their wits on a finish none of them can have known, Groenewegen drifted away with 200 metres remaining in what looked initially more a feint than a sprint.

His opponents had to get round Groenewegen’s two lead-out men, Mike Teunissen and Amund Grøndal Jansen, and in the split second it took them to gain a measure of the situation, the Dutchman was gone. Behind, Van der Poel had positioned himself too far back and had to come round both Trentin and his fellow Italian Davide Cimolai, and the upshot was that no one got within shouting distance of Groenewegen, who completely defied the conventional wisdom that the man who strikes out first on an uphill finish is bound to lose.

For the second day running a breakaway came agonisingly close to making it to the finish, this time a six-man effort including the Scotts, Jacob and Robert, who ride for Swift and Wiggins respectively. Van der Poel’s man Dries de Bondt was there, so too the Belgian Christophe Noppe and the Irishman Rory Townsend, along with the local rider Harry Tanfield, who took a surprise stage win in the 2018 Tour de Yorkshire out of a very similar breakaway.

As the race sped south from Berwick, the sextet were helped when a level crossing gate closed at a propitious moment between break and bunch, causing several minutes’ delay while the various bits of the race were stopped, put back in their proper place in the convoy, and restarted. That took the impetus out of the chase, led by Trentin’s Mitchelton-Scott and Cimolai’s Israel Cycling Academy. Ten kilometres out the breakaway still had a chance, but they were swept up with a kilometre to go.

On Tuesday the race takes a completely different turn with a 173km run across the north Pennines to the Lake District. There is only one ascent ranked first category but in the final 130km there is a constant succession of climbs around or over the 300m mark. The stage has a profile like the Needles, and it culminates with the appropriately named climb up Beast Bank in Kendal, where Steve Cummings forged his 2016 overall victory. It will not decide the race but it will give it a very definite shape.