25-year-old Dylan Teuns (BMC Racing Team) showed he could keep an impressively cool head under the heaviest of enemy fire on Friday as the young Belgian clinched his first ever overall victory in a WorldTour race at the Tour de Pologne despite severe pressure from his rivals.
The GC leader since Thursday, when Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe) cracked on the first of two severely hilly stages that brought down the curtain on the Tour de Pologne, Teuns began the seventh and final day of racing with no less than 11 riders at 43 seconds or less on GC. The closest, local favourite and former Pologne winner Rafal Majka (Bora-Hansgrohe), was just six seconds back.
The heat was on with a vengeance, then, but finally Teuns held off Majka and an arguably even more dangerous Wout Poels (Team Sky) to win the Tour de Pologne by a mere two seconds, with Poels third, after the Dutchman captured the final stage.
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It was a gripping finale, and Teuns came within a whisker of cracking completely on the ultra-steep Sciana Bukovina climb close to the finish, particularly thanks to Poels repeated attacks. Teuns clung onto the group initially, albeit with difficulty, but then on the second part of the ascent, coming after the official summit of the climb, the Dutchman started to power up the road again on the wheel of teammate Diego Rosa and Teuns was definitely in trouble.
However, teammate Tejay van Garderen not far away and the American was able to provide Teuns with some extremely timely support, dragging him up the final part of the climb just when he was on the point of cracking. This support in turn allowed the Belgian to get back on even terms with Poels and Rosa on the descent. After that, there was still the final unclassified climb to Bukowina left to tackle and everything left to play for, with Teuns jettisoning all his energy bars at the foot of the climb to ensure he had as little extra weight as possible when it came down to the final battle.
But despite repeated different attacks, Teuns was able to shadow all the right moves, finish fifth on the stage and claim the overall win, albeit by the narrowest of margins. It was also BMC Racing Team's first ever victory in the Tour de Pologne.
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