Rafal Majka confirmed his status as the strongest climber in the Tour de Pologne when he won today's hardest stage of the race. The Pole made his attack in two steps and revealed that he had only been at 70% when he launched his first acceleration.

One month ago Rafal Majka had not won a single professional race but since he opened his account in the Tour de France stage to Risoul, he has been unstoppable. After his win in yesterday’s first mountain stage of the Tour de Pologne, the Pole made it a clean sweep of the hilly stages in his home race by winning today’s traditional stage to Bukowina Tatrzanska.

All day, Majka showed his intentions by using his very strong Tinkoff-Saxo team to make the race as hard as possible and it was a huge turn by Pawel Poljanski on the third last climb that made the first big selection. Rory Sutherland and Oliver Zaugg did a fabulous work on the lowers slopes of the penultimate ascent, setting up their captain for his first attack.

Majka stroke on the steep 22% section near the top but failed to get clear of his rivals and at the top, an 8-rider group had formed. With several riders having teammates in the second group that included race leader Petr Vakoc (Omega Pharma-Quick Step), however, there was no great cohesion among the leaders.

At the bottom of the final climb, the two groups merged to form a 20-rider front group and an impressive Zaugg went straight back to work to set his captain up for one final attack that should serve the purpose of gaining time on the time triallists. Again he used the steepest section of the 4km climb to the finish to make his move and this time only Ion Izagirre could match him.

The Basque cracked after just a few seconds and fell back to his teammate Benat Intxausti who rode a perfect climb within his limits. Hitting the final two easier kilometres, the two Movistar riders started to trade pulls and gradually close the gap to the lone Pole.

From there, it was a fierce pursuit all the way to the line and inside the final kilometre, the Movistar pair seemed to be getting closer. However, Majka managed to keep them at bay and rode hard all the way to the line to maximize his time gains.

"First, the Giro d'Italia, then the Tour de France, and now the Tour de Pologne," he said. "I have a great momentum at the moment.

"First I want to thank the team. Without them, I would not have won the stage. They did a lot of work to tire out the peloton. I  attacked on the Gliczarów but it was an attack only on 70 percent. I wanted to whittle down the group and drop some of the time triallist. I did that but Izagirre survived.

"Then my teammate Oliver Zaugg joined me and helpted me a lot. They all looked at me when I attacked on the last climb. It was very hard to keep going after the attack but everybody dropped off."

“Today’s stage was a display of excellent teamwork first of all," sports director Tristan Hoffman said. "Everybody did their part in order to make Rafal succeed in the final few kilometers and it simply couldn’t have been more perfect. We took control of the pace and never allowed a gap bigger than four minutes and on the final slope, Oliver pulled so hard that the race leader was dropped. From then on, Rafal soloed his way to victory.

"Now we have two stage wins in the pocket. Tomorrow’s a different story. A flat time trial but we’ll go full gas and see how far that’ll take us."