LECCE, Italy: Dutch sprinter Casper van Uden outsmarted the favorites to win stage four of the Giro d’Italia on Tuesday while Mads Pedersen held the overall race lead finishing fourth.
Olav Kooij of Visma was in second place and Maikel Zijlaard of Tudor was third for an all-Dutch podium after a nervy mass bunch sprint on a winding and relatively narrow home straight in downtown Lecce, in the heel of Italy.
The 23-year-old Van Uden’s win comes on his first Grand Tour and he ran around in excitement hugging his teammates as they crowded around him.
“I didn’t do it alone. We did it with the whole team, all the boys here and all the staff,” he said.
“I didn’t have to take any wind until the last 200m and so I just went for it and hoped for the best,” the Picnic Post NL rider added.
Dressed entirely in pink, Dane Pedersen was slightly boxed in on the home straight and had lost his teammates as he himself tried for the win and still came fourth.
Lidl-Trek’s Pedersen tops the overall rankings seven seconds ahead of pre-race favorite Primoz Roglic.
None of the favorites for the overall title lost any time other than the two seconds Roglic gained on all of them in an intermediate sprint.
The team however lost a key rider in a late fall with Soren Kragh Andersen crossing the line holding on with one hand.
“The final was really something special,” Pedersen said.
“Wide roads and narrow roads and so on. So a stressful day in the end,” the 29-year-old added.
The fourth stage rolled out of tourist town Alberobello, known for its atypical conical roofs, for a largely flat 189km run to Lecce with packed ranks of fans in towns and villages.
Lone escapee Spanish rider Francisco Munoz of Polti Visit Malta broke from the flag and rode the first 130km of the route on his own.
The 23-year-old would later be caught as he spent the day in the spotlight.
A crash at a feed zone brought down Pedersen in the pink jersey, Briton Tom Pidcock and French climber Romain Bardet among others as Canadian Nickolas Zukowsky became the third rider to pull out of this year’s Giro.
Stage five is a 188km run to the ancient hill town Matera where large parts of the James Bond movie No Time to Die were filmed.
