Denmark’s Mads Pedersen takes the title after gruelling conditions force the race to be shortened. Pedersen finished ahead of pre-race favourite Italian Matteo Trentin and Swiss Stefan Küng, who took second and third spots respectively.
The race lit up with 234km of the shortened race distance of 261km still to go when a group of 11 riders attacked off the front, including Slovenia’s Primoz Roglic (this year’s winner of the Vuelta), Columbia’s Nairo Quintana and Ecuador’s Richard Carapaz. The group would eventually build up a maximum gap of around 4 minutes 30 seconds before it was eventually reeled in during the first of nine laps on the circuit.
The race saw many abandonments, including one of the pre-race favourites, Philippe Gilbert, who crashed on the first time up the climb up Parliament Street. Remco Evenepoel would stay with him but the combination of wet weather and the crash proved to be too much for the Belgian.
The mood seemed pretty subdued, no doubt dampened by the rain until Lawson Craddock of USA attacked with 67km to go, to be joined by Swiss rider Stefan Kung. The pair would stay away until 46km when Max Pedersen of Denmark joined the duo, which coincided with Craddock’s legs giving up.
Pedersen and Kung worked together in earnest, before being joined by Dutch rider Mike Teunissen and Italian Gianni Moscon. But with 35km to go, Nils Pollitt of Germany attacked and pre-race favourites Matteo Trentin of Italy and Mathieu Van der Poel of the Netherlands took the opportunity to join Pollitt. Trentin and Van der Poel would be the only ones capable of bridging across to the three leaders, working together until the leaders reached the last lap, when Van der Poel would find that the race was one lap too long for his legs and he lost contact with the group.
Moscon would be distanced in the final kilometres, leaving the three riders to fight it out for the finish, with Pedersen reigning supreme in the final few metres.
