Henderson outsprints best to claim Tour of Spain stage win

New Zealand’s Greg Henderson scored a brilliant sprint victory in the third stage of the Tour of Spain (Vuelta a Espagne) today.

The 2004 world track champion powered to a superb victory in the bunch sprint on the flat 190km stage from Zutphen to Venlo in the Netherlands outsprinting Borut Bozic of Slovenia and Spain’s Oscar Freire, the three-time world champion.

It moved Henderson to second in the overall standings, just six seconds behind the yellow jersey of Swiss star Fabian Cancellara.

It is just the second time that a New Zealander has won an individual stage in a grand tour (Italy, France and Spain), after Paul Jesson won a stage on the Tour of Spain 29 years ago, while Chris Jenner was part of the Credit Agricole team that won the team time trial stage in the Tour de France in 2001.

“I am very happy with the win today,” Henderson said. “Today was a very difficult finish. There were a lot of curves and we lost a few of our riders. We had to improvise a little bit. There was also a lot of headwind, so that made it easy for other teams to swarm our train.”

The primary aim was to get his teammate and No 1 sprinter Andrew Greipel to the front but a tricky chicane near the finish split the field.

"We were setting up the sprint for [André] Greipel - all day we were saying, 'Let's set it up for André'. I was waiting and looking for Greipel but it was 150 metres to go so I thought I better go myself."

And while it proved a day of great fortune for one kiwi, it was not so for fellow New Zealander Julian Dean who suffered a mechanical issue in the last 10kms and had a difficult chase as the peloton raised the tempo to break-neck speed after catching an early break that at one stage had a lead of more than nine minutes.

Tomorrow’s fourth stage is 224km from Venlo in the Netherlands to Liege in Belgium.