Caleb Ewan has sprinted to victory in the second stage of the Tour de Korea. The Australian ORICA-GreenEDGE rider proved to be the fastest of the bunch and, as a result, obtained the jersey for the best young rider as well.

The beginning of the 174 kilometres long stage was characterised by multiple attempts to form a breakaway group, but none of the escapes got more than a few minutes. A group of four escapees managed to take three minutes on the peloton, and Drapac rode at the front for most of the day to control the break, getting help from OGE. Within the final ten kilometres, the peloton brought it back to a bunch and the team prepared for a sprint.

After his crash yesterday, Caleb Ewan was extremely happy to outsprint the bunch: “It was a really good day for us. I wasn’t feeling great to start with today, because of the crash yesterday. For the first hour, the pace was high so it was really fast to start with. Once I had warmed up, I started feeling good though.

“With Drapac having the jersey, they were chasing for most of the day, and when they started running out of guys towards the end, that’s when we put a few guys on the front, especially towards the end when the hills started. We had guys controlling it, because there were so many attacks in the final 20km. Then it all came back for the bunch sprint, and that’s when I went for it!”

After some bad luck in yesterday’s finale, sports director David McPartland is pleased that all went according to plan today: “We fixed up the issues from yesterday; we improved yesterday’s results to the best result we could have had, so we’re very happy.

“Initially, today we wanted to see how Caleb and Mitch Docker bounced back from yesterday’s crash. Especially Mitch had a really nasty, heavy fall. Our plan for the first half of the stage was to stay calm, stay quiet and then assess from there.

“During the second half of the stage, Caleb was feeling good so we wanted to keep it together for a bunch sprint. We really wanted to take on Wippert one on one. The whole team was really confident in Caleb and we’re extremely happy with the win.”