Presidential Cycling Tour of Turkiye 2025 Stage 2

April 28, 2025 The route from Kemer to Kalkan is 167KM with nearly 2,500M of elevation coming from three main climbs. They leave the coastal town of Kemer and head inland to take on the first two climbs in the opening 40KM of the race. After the Treasures of Turkiye Sprint Prime with 72KM to go, the race passes through Gürses for the last climb which tops out 59KM from the finish. The riders stay up on a plateau for 23KM before descending back to the coast into Kaş for a flat run into Kalkan with a slightly uphill finish. Clear skies formed sharp shadows with warm conditions at 25C (77F). The start of the race was difficult with a climb out of the gate but a group of five formed including Mateusz Gajdulewicz of Mazowsze Serce Polski, Willie Smit of China Glory-Mentech, Antoine Berlin and Vinzent Dorn of BIKE AID, and Ahmet Örken of Spor Toto Cycling. They had 3 minutes with 64KM and 5KM still to climb on the last classified climb of the day. Unibet-Tietema Rockets started to ride quite hard to shed the fast men and eventually Alexander Kristoff of Uno-X Mobility was dropped along with yesterday's winner Simon Dehairs of Alpecin-Deceuninck. Dorn won the points at the top and will take the Mountains Jersey tomorrow but with the pace behind, the gap was just 50 seconds. He pressed on along the undulating plateau but the race was all back together with 55KM to go. The peloton descended through wide, sweeping corners down to the crystal clear blue water in the port town of Kaş. Unibet-Tietema Rockets continued to lead on the serpentine coastal road toward Kalkan but they seemed to run out of resources and opened themselves up to attacks. Solution Tech-Vini Fantini sent a rider with 6KM to go but there were enough teams looking for a sprint that shut it down like Euskatel-Euskadi and Caja Rural Seguros RGA. Mario Aparicio of Burgos-Burpellet BH was next to attack around the headland on a pretty difficult uphill section of the road with 4.5KM to go. The attack was so fierce that no one was able to latch on. Alpecin-Deceuninck and Lotto did the work to pull it back but not until 1KM to go. Jon Aberasturi of Euskatel-Euskadi put on the pace from 500M when the road started to drag up. Jasper de Buyst of Lotto took over at 300M but he didn't have a teammate in the line behind him. Giovanni Lonardi of Polti-VisitMalta was first to come off the wheel of de Buyst and looked to have a good run but Tibor Del Grosso of Alpecin-Deceuninck went around the outside and took the win by half a bike length on Lonardi to take his first profession win and give Alpecin-Deceuninck their second win in as many days. Lander Loockx finished third for Unibet-Tietema Rockets giving them a prize for pulling the bunch for the majority of the day.