Guardini makes it three at Tour de Langkawi

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Andrea Guardini (Astana) got back to winning ways at the Tour de Langkawi, seeing off Jakub Mareczko (Southeast) and yellow jersey Caleb Ewan (Orica-GreenEdge) to secure his third victory in four stages.

Whereas the two climbs in yesterday’s stage meant the Italian was unable to contest the sprint, today’s flat 165km route down the east coast of Malaysia from Kota Bharu to Kuala Berang was tailor-made for him to secure his 17th victory since 2011. Yesterday’s stage winner Ewan got boxed in and came from too far back, while fellow 20-year-old Mareczko was in a good position but lacked Guardini’s raw speed.

“For me things are really good at the moment,” said Guardini, “and I think I can make it more [wins] than this.

“Maybe on paper I’m faster than him [Ewan] but on the road every stage is different. He’s strong in all the other parcours, not only the flat stages.”

The young Australian was wearing the leader’s jersey in a UCI race for the first time as a professional but felt it may have held him back. “You get a little more respect in the bunch and but aside from that it’s more responsibility for the team, which is a downside probably,” he said.

“The break really stuck it to us and we were going full gas from about 60km. That really burned a lot of our guys and we didn’t have many at the end which made it really hard. We got a bit swamped in the last kilometre and it got really messy behind their wheels because obviously everyone was trying to fight for Guardini’s wheel, and I couldn’t start my sprint until about 100m to go which is obviously too late when you’re racing against guys like him.”

How it unfolded
After 30km of racing a group of five finally formed, made up of Jonathan Clarke (UnitedHealthCare), Pierre-Luc Perichon (Bretagne-Seche Environnement), Elchin Asadov (Synergy-Baku), Jamalidin Novardianto (Pegasus), Vladimir Gusev (Skydive Dubai).

Two chasers, Meiyin Wang (Hengxiang) and Nazim Bakirchi (Torku Sekerspor), managed to bridge across and in the space of 10km the seven-man breakaway had an advantage of four minutes 30 seconds.

With Perichon just 22 seconds down on GC, his services were deemed counterproductive and he dropped back to the peloton.

The gap hovered around the four-minute mark until they had covered almost 100km, whereupon Astana and Orica-GreenEdge taking turns on the front of the peloton to bring it down. With 40km they had three minutes and the game was up shortly after they passed the 10km banner.

Tinkoff-Saxo, MTN-Qhubeka and Southest all did turns on the front but it was Guardini who managed to get himself in prime position to demonstrate his superior speed.

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