An emotional victory for Haas

February 14 ^th 2018 - 16:41 [GMT + 4]

Tears of joy could be seen in Nathan Haas’ eyes as the Australian puncheur claimed his first victory with his Katusha-Alpecin kit on Wednesday, at the end of an action-packed stage 2 on the Tour of Oman. After 167.5km of racing from Sultan Qaboos University to Al Bustan, Haas made the most of his explosive abilities to win ahead of the Olympic champion Greg Van Avermaet (BMC Racing Team) and Alexey Lutsenko (Astana).

The challenges lying ahead, with four categorised climbs, attracted many attackers. It took 5 km of battle for four of them to break away from the bunch: Loïc Chetout (Cofidis, Solutions crédits), Markel Irizar (Trek-Segafredo), Fabricio Ferrari (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA) and Danny Pate (Rally Cycling). At km 17, their lead reached 4 minutes. It never got higher.

As the attackers tackled the first climb of the day, at Fanja (km 60), the gap had stabilised around 3 minutes. More than enough for Loic Chetout to snatch the points at the summit. The Frenchman repeated the feat atop the climbs of Al Jabal street (km 118.5km) and Al Hamriyah (km 145), en route to claiming the golden jersey as leader of the most aggressive rider classification.

The attackers gave their all in the final part of the stage, the most demanding. But Spanish race veteran Markel Irizar was finally caught in the climb of Al Jissah, with only 5 km to go. BMC Racing Team and Astana Pro Team were then the most active teams at the front of the pack. They couldn’t fend off Nathan Haas as he went for his first victory since August 2016.