Sergio Higuita has the third stage in the Tour of Poland won. The Colombian was the fastest on a final climb of one and a half kilometers, keeping Pello Bilbao and Quinten Hermans behind him. It is already his fifth victory of the season for Higuita, and he says that he owes this victory to the training sessions in his youth.
Higuita was initially not well positioned on the final climb, but was able to advance four hundred meters from the finish. With two hundred yards to go, when the road leveled off, he thought his moment had been chosen. No one could answer his acceleration, and so the rider from BORA-hansgrohe the victory, and also the leader’s jersey. “This is a very nice win. I have to thank the team because this is really the work of the whole team. Everyone contributed to this victory and the accompanying leader’s jersey,” said the Colombian champion.
Higuita: ‘In Colombia there are a lot of mountains that resemble today’s’
“The final climb was really tough. It was short, but very steep.’ But that suits Higuita, as it turns out. And the pocket climber has an explanation for that. “When I was young I always tried to finish on these climbs in training and then ride them full. In Colombia there are a lot of mountains that resemble today’s final climb’, says Higuita.
When INEOS Grenadiers moved on with Jhonatan Narváez at the bottom of the climb, Higuita was not immediately in the forefront. Had he been taken by surprise, or was it a conscious choice? ‘I tried to save some for the last two hundred meters, because it’s important that you have something in your legs at the end. If you already empty yourself at the beginning of the climb, you won’t succeed,” he explains his approach, which was clearly the right one.