Kooij loses leader’s jersey to dominant Lapeira on tough climb in Tour of Poland

The Tour of Poland started on Monday with a flat stage. Olav Kooij (Visma | Lease a Bike) was the big favorite on paper, and he lived up to expectations with the victory. This made him the first yellow jersey wearer, but the second stage was a lot tougher. It was already difficult for the GC contenders in the stage to Karpacz, especially with the tough uphill finish.

Bauke Mollema had secured the mountain jersey in the first stage, but he would not hold onto it for long. Four men colored the breakaway of the day, and the Groningen native from Lidl-Trek was not one of them. Max Walker (EF Education - EasyPost) and Patrick Gamper (Jayco-AlUla) were there, however. They were joined by home riders Patryk Stosz and Tomasz Budzinski, representing the Polish national team.

Stosz took the points in the intermediate sprint and quickly dropped back, but his teammate Budzinski picked up all the points on three of the day's four climbs. All of them were category 2 climbs, giving him 15 points. That was 12 more than Mollema, who picked up 3 points on day one. The remaining trio did not fight for the victory: with 40 kilometers to go, their lead was already less than a minute.

At that point, the chasing peloton was still intact, even though the stage had some 2,200 meters of climbing. On the narrow roads, this led to a crash, and mountain jersey wearer Mollema was involved. Together with Juan Guillermo Martinez (Picnic PostNL) and Bob Jungels (INEOS Grenadiers), he went down hard, but they were able to continue. Meanwhile, Walker jumped away from the leading group. He left his fellow breakaway riders behind and was the first to reach the penultimate climb.

With 20 kilometers to go, he kept his lead nicely stable. The final climb to Karpacz was not very difficult: would the peloton arrive too late? The strong Walker still had a comfortable minute's lead with 10 kilometers to go. But INEOS Grenadiers and Lidl-Trek picked up the pace. The British time trialist really lost momentum there, and so the party was over with 5 kilometers to go. UAE Team Emirates - XRG had taken control, and the peloton was suddenly thinned out considerably.

That team was counting on the skills of Brandon McNulty and Jan Christen, but Mathias Vacek (Lidl-Trek) was on his wheel. Finn Fisher-Black (Red Bull) also made his presence felt at the front, but it was Michal Kwiatkowski who did a perfect lead-out for Magnus Sheffield. But it was Christen who went for it, but he started too early. Paul Lapeira then cruised to victory.