KEY POINTS:
Hawkes Bay rider Jeremy Yates grabbed hold of the leader's yellow jersey after the opening two stages of the six-day Tour of Southland cycling race yesterday.
His Subway team gave a polished display to set up Yates, the national club road race champion and national points series leader, for the steep 1000m assault up Bluff Hill in the 84.63km second stage.
That saw him overtake early tour leader Heath Blackgrove, who held the yellow jersey after the morning's first stage, an 8.42km team trial.
Yates clocked 2h 6m 9s to win stage two with Glen Chadwick (Raboplus) second at 8s, Aaron Strong (Ascot Park Hotel) at 16s, Blackgrove at 21s and defending champion Hayden Roulston (The Southland Times-Trek) completing the top five 31s behind the leader.
Yates leads the general classification on a total time of 2h 16m 10s followed by Blackgrove at 25s, Chadwick at 29s, Strong at 34s, James Williamson (Subway-Avanti) at 38s and Roulston at 44s.
Subway established their credentials with Williamson taking the lead in the under-23 section while Yates, by virtue of overcoming some demons up Bluff Hill, also leads the king of the mountains classification which he won last year.
Yates fell out of contention on this same stage from Invercargill to Bluff Hill when he lost 20min on the leaders last year.
"It was sweet revenge in a way after what happened to me on this stage last year; I had a few demons to shake off," said Yates, who admitted to being a little nervous at the start.
"It was windy and hard out there today. There was a break that went early and we were a little bit worried when [six-time Canadian champion] Dominique Rollin made the first move.
"But my teammates held it together - Hayden Godfrey did an awesome job coming into the bottom of Bluff Hill and James Williamson from there when he hit the front to set it up perfectly for me and I was able to skip through at the base of the main climb by myself."
Rollin took his chance to link up with an early break after 7km featuring four riders, including Australian Joel Pearson, of the Powernet team, and pushed the others hard.
After seeing the peloton, driven by Subway, Colourplus and Raboplus, sit steady behind at between 1m and 2m, he backed off after about 50km and rejoined the peloton.
Today's 165km third stage is from Invercargill to Gore.
- NZPA
