Matteo Trentin and Adam Blythe have a dust up before the sprint finish (Image credit: Tim de Waele/TDWSport.com)
Matteo Trentin (Quick-Step Floors) built on his second-place finish during stage 2 at the Vuelta a Espana and climbed to the podium's top step on Tuesday, easily winning the stage 4 field sprint in Tarragona and earning the green sprint jersey for his efforts.
The 198.2km stage from Escaldes to Tarragona included just one intermediate sprint and one KOM, which came about three quarters of the way through the day on the Alto de Belltall. From there it was a mostly downhill run to the finish, where the sprint teams avoided some late crashes in the mad rush to the line.
Before the spent trains started lining up in Tarragona, however, a group of five that included Johan Le Bon (FDJ), Stéphane Rossetto (Cofidis), Diego Rubio and Nicholas Schultz (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA) and Juan Felipe Osorio (Manzana Postobon) slipped away n the opening kilometres. The quintet built a gap of eight minutes 80km into the day before the sprinters' teams came to the fore and started eating into the advantage. Rubio and Rossetto left their breakaway companions behind n the climb, but by then the field was bearing down in earnest and the catch was all-but inevitable.
In the end, the sprinters' teams won the day, and Quick-Step's picture-perfect lead out delivered Trentin to his first Vuelta stage win.
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