The Brit Won in Croatia
The 27-year-old won his first stage race of 2019 at the UCI 2.1 category CRO Race. He finished 22 seconds ahead of Davide Villella from Astana. Yates had taken the decisive lead when he had won stage five on a summit finish at Platak. Yesterday, during the last stage, he defended his lead and finished 7th.
“Today panned out perfectly, we didn’t want to risk working too much earlier in the day and having nobody in the final circuits just in case it kicked off,” Yates said yesterday. “From the beginning of the week we set out to win a stage and hopefully the GC would come along with that and that’s pretty much what ended up happening. Alex was up there almost every stage challenging for the win and Brent and Callum really set me up for my win on stage five, so as a team we couldn’t have done much more.”
The win comes as a little bit of consolation after Yates failed to place well at this year’s Tour de France, the ultimate goal of his season.
CRO Race 2019 results
1. Adam Yates (Mitchelton-Scott) – 20:57:05
2. Davide Villella (Astana) + 22s
3. Víctor de la Parte (CCC) + 29s
4. Andrey Zeits (Astana) + 42s
5. Domen Novak (Bahrain-Merida) + 50s
6. Alexis Guerin (Delko Marseille Provence) + 1:09
7. Pierre Rolland (Vital Concept – B&B Hotels) + 1:25
8. Brent Bookwalter (Mitchelton-Scott) + 1:42
9. Sjoerd Bax (Metec – TKH Continental) + 1:45
10. Radoslav Rogina (Adria Mobil) + 2:09
