Kasper Asgreen rounded off a clean sweep of wins for Soudal-QuickStep at the Tour of Slovakia with teammate Rémi Cavagna taking the overall victory.
Cavagna built most of his eventual winning gap of 2:16 with victory on the opening stage using a 45km solo attack on the hilly parcours, starting and finishing in Košice.
Tim Merlier (Soudal-QuickStep) took the bunch sprints on stages 2 and 4, both ahead of Cees Bol (Astana Qazaqstan), but there wasn’t to be a hat-trick on today’s final stage for the Belgian as Asgreen attacked late in the final kilometre to complete a perfect five days of racing in Slovakia.
Stage 3 was won by Andrea Bagioli (Soudal-QuickStep) in a reduced-group sprint after the hardest stage of the race, taking Soudal-QuickStep’s 50th win of the season as a team.
Cavagna lost no time that day, all but confirming his victory of the overall GC with Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ) and Milan Vader (Jumbo-Visma) eventually rounding off the podium on the final day.
The Belgian team ended the race with a haul of five stage victories, the winner’s yellow jersey, green points jersey and the team classification.
Vader and Jumbo-Visma completed a strong five days of racing with the KOM jersey in hand and the youth classification victory for promising development team talent, Colby Simmons.
