Jonathan Milan finished off the fine work of his Lidl-Trek team, who made his final stage victory at Volta a Valenciana practically inevitable with a dominant lead-out in the final kilometre.
Milan trounced his rivals with a powerful surge to beat Jake Stewart (Israel-Premier Tech) and Giovanni Lonardi (Team Polti VisitMalta) in Valencia.
While it looked textbook, Milan revealed that the stage was harder than it seemed from the television images.
“It was a pretty tough stage, and also super fast with the wind – it was always getting nervous in the bunch,” Milan said in the post-race interview.
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“We had one echelon where I was in the front – we were ready for it, and knew that it could happen. It went really well. We started pulling immediately at the beginning of the stage, then in these echelons, and then the team just left me in the best spot for for sprinting. I just gave my best and thank the team for this.”
Santiago Buitrago (Bahrain Victorious), having secured the overall lead with an impressive burst of speed on Saturday’s summit finish, finished safely in the peloton to win the Volta ahead of João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) and teammate Pello Bilbao.
It was a flat end to the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana, with riders covering just 104.2 kilometres between Alafar and Valencia – through part of the hardest hit areas from the flash floods of 2024.
Jokin Murguialday (Euskaltel-Euskadi), Sinhue Fernández (Burgos Burpellet BH), Joan Bou (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA), Quentin Bezza (Wagner Bazin WB), Nathan Smith (Team Novo Nordisk) and Edgard Cadena (Team Polti VisitMalta) formed the day’s breakaway in the first kilometres and forged a maximum lead of around 2:30 before the Ineos and UAE Team Emirates-led peloton began to chip away at their advantage.
The six riders were keeping a lead of over a minute with 39km to go when Cadena punctured out of the move. It cost the breakaway some momentum, and their gap began coming down steadily. By 20km to go, they had only half a minute as the sprinters were motivated to keep them in catching distance.
Knowing they were within reach, the peloton slowed down and let the gap go back out – temporarily – to nearly a minute again.
However, once Lidl-Trek got going to lead out Milan, the gap was back down to under 20 seconds with 15km to go. They had the breakaway in sight with 7km to go and swept past with 5.5km remaining.
Lidl-Trek battled with Israel-Premier Tech in the twisting run-in to the final kilometre, but Edward Theuns piloted Milan expertly through to the final 200 metres, delivering the Italian to a second stage win.
More to come…
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