Nordhaug holds on to win Tour de Yorkshire

BELGIAN Ben Hermans won the third and final stage of the inaugural Tour de Yorkshire as Team Sky’s Lars Petter Nordhaug hung on to secure overall victory in Leeds yesterday.

BMC Racing’s Hermans attacked with ten kilometres remaining of the rolling 167km course from Wakefield to Leeds, soon sweeping by the fading solo effort of American Lawson Craddock (Giant-alpecin) and quickly building a 20-second lead on the way into the finish in Roundhay Park.

That was enough to secure the stage win by a final margin of nine seconds as the peloton behind squabbled over the general classification places, with Nordhaug able to stay with the secondary group and maintain his lead.

In the final standings, the Norwegian won by 11 seconds from BMC’S Samuel Sanchez and Thomas Voeckler of Europcar. Team Sky’s Irish rider Philip Deignan finished fifth overall, 24 seconds back on his team-mate.

Once again, the Yorkshire public turned out in huge numbers despite a poor forecast and the occasional shower along the way, with the route lined almost from start to finish and only a narrow path clearing for the riders on the biggest climb of the day to the Cow and Calf above Ilkley.

Sir Bradley Wiggins, enjoying something of a lap of honour as he winds down his road racing career, started the day more than 15 minutes down in the general classification and was again well off the back as the leaders crossed the line.

Meanwhile, Wiggins remains confident of breaking the Hour Record next month despite seeing fellow Briton Alex Dowsett raise the bar on Saturday.

Dowsett recorded a distance of 52.937 km in 60 minutes at the Manchester Velodrome to beat the mark set by Australian Rohan Dennis in February, but Wiggins is confident he can go much further in his own attempt scheduled for 7 June in London.

“I think it still leaves me in the same position. I’ll still go for the pace I’ve been training at,” said Wiggins. “Based on what I’ve been doing in the last three weeks, I should be quite a way ahead of that. We’ve been training on 54 [kilometres] dead as a guide but it could go one kilometre further or 500 metres shorter depending on conditions on the day.”

Wiggins said he was unsurprised that the 26-year-old Dowsett, who has haemophilia and rode the Hour to raise awareness of the disease, had been able to beat Dennis’s distance. “A part of me thought if he’s going for it he’d break it because he’s quite calculating like that,” Wiggins said. “He’d have done his homework.”