Nacer Bouhanni of Cofidis has won the fourth stage of the Vuelta a Catalunya.
Snow meant that the stage had to be started from the village of Montferrer and was now a 132km stage with a finish at Igualada.
Diego Rubio (Caja Rural), José Gonçalves (Katusha-Alpecin), Matteo Bono (UAE Team Emirates), Martijn Keizer (LottoNl-Jumbo) and Juan Osorio (Manzana Postobon) got away with nearly an hour of racing gone and they had a lead of 1.36 with fifty kilometres left.
A crash with thirty kilometres took down a number of riders including Katusha-Alpecin's Ilnur Zakarin who got back on and finished the stage but won't be starting stage five, his team have reported.
The break was caught at the start of the final climb and Astana's Dario Cataldo and Jakob Fuglsang tried to get clear but were soon caught as was AG2R's Romain Bardet and Quick-Step's Dan Martin, who was soon brought back to heel by Geraint Thomas who put in another good shift on behalf of Team Sky.
On the descent, Marc Soler (Movistar) who was sixth on GC and in the lead of the young riders classification and David Gaudu (FDJ) attacked with Chris Froome and Movistar's Alejandro Valverde.
They were away for five kilometres before their threat was taken care of and it came down to a sprint.
Davide Cimolai was set up by his FDJ team but Nacer Bouhanni went with 200 metres to go and took the victory in a time of 3.04.27 ahead of Cimolai and Orica Scott's Darryl Impey.
Geraint Thomas finished in 12th place to move up to third place on GC behind Tejay Van Garderen of BMC who leads the race by 41 seconds from his team mate Sammy Sanchez.
Article by Kev Monks
Source: DSG
