Milan Kadlec wins the 2012 Tour of Taihu Lake opener
After a slow start to his 2012 campaign, Milan Kadlec of Team ASC Dukla Praha bagged an important victory during the opening stage of the Tour of Taihu Lake 2012.
The Czech took a total time of 3 hours, 3 minutes and 45 seconds and occupied the top podium position restricting the race favourites.
Joey Rosskopf of Team Type 1 – Sanofi and Floris Goesinnen of Team Drapac Cycling finished at almost the same time and settled for the second and the third positions respectively.
Ki Ho Choi of Team Hong Kong finished 3 seconds behind at the fourth position with Mathieu Delaroziere of Team La Pomme Marseille claiming the fifth spot.
“I’ve won a fair bit in my career but this is a very nice victory,” Kadlec told Cyclingnews after crossing the finish-line.
“We knew the reputation of the Tour of Taihu as a sprinters’ race,” said Goesinnen.
“In that case, I had no reason to save my legs for a sprint as I’m not a sprinter. Only wins count but as we were expecting a bunch sprint, finishing third in a sprinter’s race is still a good result”.
“When I attacked with 6km to go, I got chased down by the town teams that had three riders in the [11-man] breakaway: One rider from Hong Kong [Choi] caught me”.
David McCann, King Lok Cheung, Thomas Vaubourzeix, Ying Hon Yeung and Alexander Serebryakov claimed the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth positions in the respective order.
Alois Kankovsky of Team ASC Dukla Praha, Jiri Hochmann of Team ASC Dukla Praha and Milan Kadlec of Team ASC Dukla Praha succeeded during the first, second and the third sprints of the race.
Milan Kadlec of Team ASC Dukla Praha leads the point’s classifications with as many as 19 points to his credit while Joey Rosskopf (12 points) of Team Type 1-Sanofi and Ki Ho Choi (11 points) of Team Hong Kong occupied the second and the third positions
respectively.
Milan Kadlec is leading the stage 1 overall classifications with a healthy lead of 7 seconds over Joey Rosskopf.
Floris Goesinnen, Ki Ho Choi and Mathieu Delaroziere holds the third, fourth and the fifth positions after the Tour of Taihu Lake stage 1 classifications.
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