Kwiatkowski the Pole Star
Few winners of week-long stage races in 2018 have had to play their cards with the same mixture of subtlety and desperation as Micha¯ Kwiatkowski this August in the Tour de Pologne. The Team Sky rider resorted to some fine Classics-style race craft for a debut home victory in a finely balanced race.
The first three stages ended in bunch sprints. Pascal Ackermann won the first two, Quick-Step’s ‘other’ Colombian sprinter, Álvaro Hodeg, took the third. Kwiatkowski became race leader thanks to his stage 4 summit finish win at Szczyrk. The following day, he boosted his advantage on the grinding, uphill bunch sprint in Bielsko-Bia¯a. So far, so strong.
But by the closing, rolling kilometres of stage 6, the Polish champion’s strong post-Tour de France form was starting to wear thin – at which point Kwiatkowski knew he had to go into damage limitation mode. Rather than burn himself out chasing the flurry of late attacks that punctuated the two last stages that were also the toughest, Kwiatkowski relied on his rivals to cancel each other out. When George Bennett, lying third overall, gapped the Pole on the ascent to the Bukowina resort on stage 6, Kwiatkowski let him go and shadowed the two counter-attackers instead: the 2017 winner, Dylan Teuns, and Thibaut Pinot. The decision to do so saved the day.
When Simon Yates, just 39 seconds back, attacked the Pole over stage 7’s last classified climb, Kwiatkowski took up the slack. He was followed by the other GC contenders. When Teuns ignored Kwiatkowski’s plea for help, the leader was rescued by Bennett and Pinot, who were both willing to chase Yates and save their GC positions. The Pole had enough in reserve to cling to their coat-tails and take the race win.
Kwiatkowski said local knowledge of the much-used stage 6 and 7 Bukowina circuits was a big factor in successfully eking out his reserves in such a high-risk strategic game. Back in 2012, when he last held the race lead on the same climbs, he’d been on the receiving end of similar attacks by Moreno Moser and had ended up second overall. This time he knew enough of what was to come to risk burning out Sky’s climbing domestiques earlier than might have seemed wise. Pavel Sivakov, Sergio Henao, Salvatore Puccio and, most impressively of all, the nonspecialist Ian Stannard all put their shoulder to the wheel before their leader handled the finales in person.
The way the race was set up meant Sky was able to rely on the sprinters’ teams to run affairs for nearly half the course.
Luck also played a small but significant part. Had Teuns not been forced to slow when a rider weaved in front of him 300 metres from the line on stage 5, the Belgian could well have overhauled Kwiatkowski and changed the race’s complexion.
The Tour of Poland’s organisers seem to have perfected the recipe for
producing high quality winners after close-run, volatile racing. Doing away with a time trial helped. And there was a silver lining to having three fairly plain sprint stages in a row at the start of the race: it meant that all the riders in the hunt for the general classification arrived in the hills within seconds of each other. Finally, none of the finishes were so excessively hard that a single rider, even one as strong as Kwiatkowski was initially, could gain more than a handful of seconds at a time.