Greg Van Avermaet (CCC Team) had to settle for second place on stage 2 of Tirreno-Adriatico on Thursday, when he was beaten to the line in an uphill sprint by Deceuninck-QuickStep's Julian Alaphilippe. "It was quite a good pace the whole day long," Van Avermaet said on his team's website. "Mitchelton-Scott controlled the race, and Gijs [Van Hoecke] and Guillaume [Van Keirsbulck] set me up really well for the last climb. "Actually, everything went perfectly for me. Michi [Michael Schär] did a good job closing some gaps, and I just tried to stay out of the wind for as long as possible, and then came to the front in the last two kilometres," he said.ADVERTISEMENT "For me, the stage couldn't have gone better, and we executed our plan exactly as we said we would in the meeting. When you get second place, it's sad, but it's the way it is, and I was pretty happy with how the team and I performed today." An attack from Primoz Roglic (Jumbo-Visma) with 3km to go looked as though it might prove decisive when it took Alexey Lutsenko (Astana), Simon Clarke (EF Education First) and Tom Dumoulin (Sunweb) with it, but Bahrain-Merida's Slovenian road race champion, Matej Mohoric, took it upon himself to bring the move back with 1.5km to go. While Roglic continued to push the pace up at the front, with Lutsenko doggedly on his wheel, eventual stage winner Alaphilippe took up third place and the trio started to move clear again.
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