Since turning professional with Tinkoff-Saxo, Marko Kump has mostly worked as a domestique but he still has the good turn of speed that allowed him to excel earlier in his career. Yesterday he got a rare chance to sprint for himself in the opening stage of Criterium International and he did well by taking third.

The weekend race, Criterium International started with an 89 kilometer short and flat stage in and around Porto-Vecchio, tailor-made for the sprinters in the field. Tinkoff-Saxo participate with debutant Edward Beltran, Rafal Majka, Marko Kump, Ivan Rovny, Evgeny Petrov, Jay McCarthy and Michael Valgren.

The stage went exactly by the book with an eager group of escapees trying to deny the sprinters of their obvious and only opportunity in the race as the other two stages are an individual time trial and a mountain stage.  With 20 kilometersto go, the pack was complete and the sprinter teams picked up the pace on the run-in to Porto-Vecchio to avoid counter-attacks.

In the bunch gallop, Tinkoff-Saxo’s Marko Kump was in the mix for the victory and finished third behind Nacer Bouhanni (FDJ) and Nathan Haas (Garmin-Sharp).

“Marko has been increasingly good form and he worked hard during Paris-Nice and it pays off now,” said Tinkoff-Saxo DS Fabrizio Guidi. "It was a very tough sprint and it’s windy here, which also might have an impact on the results of tonight’s individual time trial over 7 kilometers. The guys are ordered to give full gas and we’ll see how far that’ll take them."