Presidential Cycling Tour of Turkiye 2025 Stage 8

May 4, 2025 The final day of the Presidential Cycling Tour of Turkiye should be a nailed on sprint. The riders head East from Çeşme to İzmir, the third largest city in Turkiye, to conclude the week of racing after just 106KM. There are two categorized climbs but they are fairly gentle and the last one comes over 50KM from the finish. The finale looks straightforward with no meaningful corners in the last few kilometers so it should be an even battle between the sprinters in their last opportunity. Zeb Kyffin of Unibet-Tietema Rockets, Marco Tizza of Wagner-Bazin WB, Metkel Eyob of Terengganu, Konrad Czabok of Mazowsze Serce Polski, and Alexandre Balmer of Solution Tech-Vini Fantini got up the road in the early break and with 83KM to go, their gap was roughly 2 minutes ahead of the bunch. Vinzent Dorn of BIKE AID joined the break with 500M to climb on the first categorized climb and the six riders went over the top together for the descent into İçmeler. Three more riders made it across with 70KM to go including Ahmet Örken and Mustafa Tekin of Spor Toto, and Burak Abay of Konya Büyükşehir Belediye Spor but the peloton were just 1 minute behind. The break went over the final categorized climb of the race with 54KM to go and a gap still of around 1 minute. The speed in the bunch on the descent was very quick but somehow Tibor Del Grosso of Alpecin-Deceuninck bridged up to the break on his own. The peloton reacted at the bottom and started a more concerted chase with Lotto and Flanders-Baloise doing the work. The riders entered the outskirts of İzmir with 30KM to go running parallel with the major highway into town. The break split up with 15KM to go when the gap came down below 20 seconds. Kyffin, Balmer, Del Grosso, and Eyob were the last riders remaining at the front. They put up a strong fight but were brought back with around 3KM to go. Lead out trains were all in their rows at 2KM to go with Uno-X Mobility, Flanders-Baloise, Lotto, and Picnic-PostNL taking up real estate on the front. Uno-X Mobility led through the final kilometer into 300M from the line when Flander-Baloise made their move with Jules Hesters who went at 250M. He hit clean air a little too soon and faded but gave Marc Brustenga of Equipo Kern Pharma a nice lead out. In almost the same scenario as yesterday, Alexander Kristoff of Uno-X Mobility came around and looked like the winner but Brustenga left the door open on the inside barriers and Matteo Malucelli of XDS-Astana popped through with just 50M to go and took the win. Kristoff finished second with Giovanni Lonardi of Polti-VisitMalta in third. XDS-Astana dominated the entire week with 4 stage wins from 4 different riders and they also took first and second in GC with Wout Poels and Harold Martín López. Guillermo Juan Martinez of Picnic-PostNL rounded out the GC podium for third, 58 seconds behind Poels.