By Shane Stokes
Matthew Teggart sealed one of the most important results of his career in an unexpected way late on Thursday, with his dominance of the intermediate sprints competition at the Tour of Britain transferring to overall victory in that classification.
Three stages were left in the race but these were cancelled after the death of Queen Elizabeth. Race organisers announced that the race standings would end as they had been on Thursday evening, meaning that Teggart was the winner of that sprints competition.
Had the race continued he likely would have won it anyway. The WiV SunGod rider showed great form and class during the event, amassing a dominant lead by going in breakaways on three out of the five stages raced and mopping up those sprint points.
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“I’m obviously delighted to win the sprints jersey overall,” the Banbridge rider told stickybottle on Friday. “I think it was a great race for both the team and myself. We did exactly what we planned to do, which was to win a jersey, to have a top ten GC, to be up there on a stage and to be in any breakaway that was going. I think the team performed exceptionally well.
“At one stage we were winning every category, pretty much. So I am really, really pleased with how it went, and on a personal level really pleased.”
Teggart got the race off to a great start on stage one, going up the road and taking all three intermediate sprints. That put him in the white jersey as leader of that classification, and he defended it in the best possible way on stage two by doing precisely the same again.
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He then won two more of those sprints on Thursday’s fifth stage, bringing his total to 24 points. His teammate Ben Perry was sitting second on just eight points, with the news about Queen Elizabeth breaking approximately two hours afterwards.
“I felt pretty strong every day in the breaks and was able to sweep up the sprint points pretty easily, and built up a very strong lead there in the end,” Teggart said. “I think yesterday [Thursday] I pretty much cemented it. It is obviously not a nice way to finish the race with it being called off like that, but I am happy to get the overall win with the five days of racing.”
Teggart has had a very strong season with a number of good results. At home he dominated the Cycling Ireland National Road series, but racing abroad was where he racked up his most important results, as well as riding strongly to help his WiV SunGod teammates on other days.
Those performances include fifth on a stage in the 2.1 Tour of Antalya in Turkey in February, sixth on a stage and third in the KOM classification at the 2.2 Tour de La Mirabelle in France in May, fourth in the 1.2-ranked Paris-Troyes in June, a stage win on day one of the Rás Tailteann that same month, plus a superb fourth in the Commonwealth Games road race.
His Tour of Britain results are further proof of his ability and, all going well, will have put him on the radar of bigger squads.
He’s now 26 years of age and would love to step up a level.
“Hopefully a few teams have taken notice. I got my name up there, obviously being in the breaks and I know I was getting a lot of TV coverage and stuff,” he said. “Hopefully I got some publicity from that some of the teams take notice.
“I am not really sure if it will lead to anything bigger for next year, but we will see, I suppose. I have nothing in the pipeline at the minute, other than remaining with SunGod. So we will see.”
