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After winning stage 2 of the Tour de Pologne, one of the odder moments of 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Sacha Modolo's press conference came when several Polish journalists asked to look at his Garmin to see what maximum speed the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:UAE Team Emirates rider had reached in his final sprint.

The reason? Katowice's unusual 900-metre downhill finishing straight is one of the fastest finales in the Wo🉐rldTour. So whenever the Tour de Pologne concludes here with a bunch sprint – which is pretty much every year – the question of the winner's top velocity is always a popular one.

As the UAE Team Emirates press officer Andrea Agostini showed the crowd of journali🥀sts leaning in to look at the photos on his phone, Modolo had reached a top speed of 74.74 km/h. Curiously that was notably slower than Marcel Kittel's 78 km/h en route to victory in 2015 in Katowice, and a long way short of Jonas Van Genechten's unofficial record of 80.8 km/h in 2014, but Sunday's headwind probably had a lot to do with that.

"I've neveꦦr won a downhill finish before," said Modolo, now in his eighth year as a pro and with career sprint victories as far afield as Argentina and China as well as two in the 2015 Giro d'Itali🦩a. "It's certainly a very different kind of sprint to the ones I'm used to, I'm better off winning when there's a curve or a climb near the finish, not so much on descents where you need more pure power. I'm actually pretty surprised I won today." He also chose to use a 54 chainring, he said, "because a 55 or a 56 would have been too much on this."

"I did what you could call a 'classic' sprint," he said. "Roberto Ferrari left me exactly where I needed to be, but I find this is a c෴omplicated finish, I've done it three or four times and I've never really got it right before.

"I tend not to do well here, and yesterday [when he was 47th] my legs weren't feeling so great, I'd been away from racing for a month and a half and it didn't seem to work out. But today I felt a lot better right from the start, and 🌃this time, with a strong headwind, I waited for a long time before finally going for it, and I got it right."

Strangely, Modolo's steady run of victories over the years - this was his fourth of the season after two stages in Croatia and a win in the 1.HC-ranked GP Gippingen in Switzerland - rarely gets him labelled a pre-race favourite. That's perhaps because the bar was unintentionally raised so high in Modolo's first year in 2010, when he took f⛎ourth in Milano-Sanremo in his first ever Monument behind Oscar Freire. But as Modolo pointed out a shade wryly in Pologne, for all he flies under the radar for long spells, "occasionally I manage to net a good one."

Much was made, too, by one journalist, of the fact that Modolo had managed to beat 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe) en route to his first World Tour victory of the season, with the reigning World Champion taking a low-key seventh at Katowice after he had blasted to an emphatic victory in Krakow on Saturday. But as Modolo pointed ou🐓t, "the most important thing is to be the fastest agai🅷nst everybody. I'm not just racing against Peter Sagan."