Tour de Pologne 2024 Stage 4

August 15, 2024 At nearly 200KM, the route starts quite hard but levels out towards the end and should give the sprinters their opportunity. Michał Paluta and Kacper Gieryk of the Polish National Team, and Szymon Sajnok of Q36.5 went up the road immediately after the flag dropped. Gieryk dropped away just as quickly, not interested in being hounded by the peloton all day. His teammate Norbert Banaszek then went on the attack along with Xabier Azparren of Q36.5. The two leaders did not wait for their teammates however and created an odd pursuit situation. Banaszek and Azparren gave up on the chase at 179KM to go when they were stuck at 90 seconds behind. In another twist of odd tactics, Gieryk and Banaszek appeared again from the peloton on the only categorized climb of the day. They bridged up to Paluta and Sajnok. Paluta's main ambition has been grabbing Mountains points and with no more to gain, he drifted out of the break. The trio of Gieryk, Banaszek, and Sajnok got rolling together with 105KM to go and just over 1 minute back to the bunch. Just 5KM later, Sajnok took an intermediate sprint and Banaszek countered to go solo. Sajnok got back to him then took a feed from the car. Gieryk saw this and attacked, this time making a split. Sajnok and Banaszek went back to the bunch as Gieryk dangled 1 minute in front the of the peloton. At one point the peloton got within 15 seconds and they seemed unwilling to catch Gieryk who had basically sat up. It created a painfully slow stand-off but Gieryk was eventually caught just under 40KM to go. The pace in the peloton did not pick up until around 10KM to go. Footage of the race went out around that point and no images were available until the fixed cameras at 750M. Lidl-Trek came through that point with control and Mads Pedersen was first to start his sprint with over 200M to go. He had a good jump but went too long. Olav Kooij of Visma-Lease a Bike came around Pedersen's left side and took the win by a bike length. Pedersen finished third after having been passed by a charging Sam Bennett of Decathlon AG2R.