Two days ago XDS-Astana were undoubtedly in pole position as Petronas Le Tour de Langkawi headed toward the queen stage. They were flying high with three impressive stage wins from Matteo Malucelliafter just four stages.
They also had high hopes for GC card Aaron Gate as he seemed to have set himself up perfectly on the rankings by snaffling a bunch of bonus seconds in the intermediate sprints to ease his path.
As rain fell in the early kilometres of stage 6, Malucelli’s run in the 2.Pro race in Malaysia came to an abrupt end. The Italian crashed and all of a sudden in two days the WorldTour team – just one of the two top tier squads in the race – had both lost its status as one of the overall favourites and also its envied position in the sprints.
Malucelli was out with an injury to the lower third of the left shin and soft tissue damage around the right knee, and XDS-Astana had lost a sprinter who seemed almost unassailable in Malaysia.
Though there was no sitting back and bemoaning the loss of the rider who was so able when it came to drawing in the victories. The chase to make the best of the situation quickly came to the fore.
It was just a short distance after Malucelli crashed, and just as the peloton had stalled after the first intermediate sprint, that Gate, Lev Gonov and Vinokurov launched in a break, working together to stay out front so they could sweep up the second round of intermediate sprint points, just 11 km after the first. The result was that Vinokurov moved up to fifth, dropping the deficit to race leader Delbove to 11 seconds and the gap to the bottom steps of the podium to just 5 seconds.
Renshaw had said at the start of the day that: “He’s not the strongest sprinter to take bonus seconds, so we have to maybe try and think a little bit outside the box.”
They did and it worked. Even though ‘plan A’ crumbled, the targets were quickly reset. If the “outside the box” thinking continues, who knows what the last days before the race ends in Kuala Lumpur shall bring.
