British cyclist Mark Cavendish claimed his first win of the season when he took the final stage of the Tour Of Oman this afternoon.
On the final 157km long stage from Qurayat to Mattrah Seafront, the race ended with a bunch sprint and leader Robert Gesink safely in the peleton and saw Cavendish storrm over the line ahead of Russia's Denis Galimzyanov and Italy's Andrea Guardini.
"Everyone tries to go for the win in races like this so it's a bit hectic," Cavendish said afterwards to the HTC Highroad Press office, "But it was great, I had [team-mates] Hayden Roulston and Matt Goss looking after me in the finish, and they did a good job holding onto me and I did a good job holding onto them all the way through."
"Goss went at the end, I left a gap then went for it myself. It was difficult with the wind, but it all worked perfectly."
"It's always good to get the first victory of the year, too, it didn't work out the other day but now I've got it and I'm happy."
_____________________________________________________________
Tony Martin netted an impressive double victory for HTC-Highroad in the Volta ao Algarve in Portugal on Sunday, winning both the final time trial and stopping Steve Cummings from winning the overall classification.
The German national time trial champion and 2010 World Time Trial bronze medallist completed the 17 kilometre course looping around the city of Portimao in a time of 21 minutes and 53 seconds, five seconds ahead of Holland's Lieuwe Wiestra.
Overall Martin finished with a 32 second advantage over HTC-Highroad team-mate Tejay Van Garderen, whose solid sixth place in the final time trial guaranteed the American second overall in the final podium of the Tour of the Algarve.
"It all went really well," HTC-Highroad sports director Brian Holm said," the course was pretty tough, a few tricky corners, but when Tony's in the kind of form he's got right now, to be honest, that didn't matter much, they could have thrown anything at him and he'll still have done well."
"Tejay also did a great time, but we weren't surprised, we could see from the training camp that both of them were in really good shape."
"Still, we did all the reconnaissance work this morning, the whole team checked out the course, and Tony did it one more time alone just to be 100 percent sure. After that it was just a question of crossing our fingers that they didn't puncture when they did the time trial itself."
"We could see on the split times they gave over the radio that they were going fast right from the start, and they kept that up all the way through."
Pictures copyright of Covsupport News Service. Credit CNS/KM