Southland’s Tom Sexton focused his frustration to claim a maiden home stage win in the SBS Bank Tour of Southland.
A key member of the New Zealand track endurance squad since 2017, the 25-year-old had never won a stage in either the Yunca Junior Tour of Southland or the senior event before he and Japanese rider Shunsuke Imamura managed to stay away and contest a two-up sprint on the Te Anau lakefront.
Sexton was pleased to have a strong breakaway partner like Imamura.
“I was lucky to have him come across and he was pulling really well through the valley and up the climb. Coming into Te Anau he was still pulling hard and I was starting to get a bit worried.”
Sexton (Macaulay Ford-GoodTech Team), who grew up holidaying on the beaches around Lake Te Anau, is coming off a big year including an Olympic debut in Paris where he was part of the men’s team pursuit which finished fifth.
“I love this race, so it’s really cool to come back and be able to win a stage,” he said.
“After the Olympics this was my main goal, to come here and have a bit of fun. I was frustrated after missing out on the break (on Monday), I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve missed the front split on the Tour of Southland and I wanted to go out there and prove a point. In my mind, once I was out in front there was no bringing me back.”
Despite being a medallist at world championship and Commonwealth Games level, Sexton has had to bide his time on the road, especially coming up through the junior ranks.
“I was actually a little whitebait, I was tiny and under-developed compared with some of the guys my age and didn’t win much through juniors. I had a growth spurt when I came into elite and the high performance programme in Cambridge.”
After making his presence felt in the early breaks, Bailey O’Donnell (Holmes Solutions) wasn’t able to cover the decisive break and set his sights on defending a time gap which would eventually put him into the leader’s orange jersey.
O’Donnell finished in the second group ahead of the main peloton to give the race its third leader in as many days. The Cantabrian has surprised even himself after taking a much more relaxed approach to his fifth Southland tour.
“I told Chris, our team manager and owner, I’m not coming here with any goals or ambitions, I’m coming here to have fun and I’m going pretty good at the moment,” O’Donnell said.
“It means a lot. This is an awesome race. I’ve never won (this jersey) before so I’m pretty stoked. I’ve been overseas for the last couple of years and when you get to the end of the year all the Kiwi boys get a bit sad overseas and we start watching Tour of Southland videos and get a bit excited about the fourth Grand Tour.”
O’Donnell, who has a 15 point lead over Sexton in the Sprint classification, holds an 18sec lead over Sam Ritchie (Central Benchmakers-Willbike, with Sam Jenner falling out of the lead to trail by 20sec.
Kiaan Watts (PowerNet) is 27sec in arrears with 2022 winner Josh Burnett (Creation Signs-MitoQ-NZ Cycling Project) 31sec back and in possession of the King of the Mountains jersey.
Australian Declan Trezise retained his lead in the under 23 category, in fifth place overall, with Southland’s Luke Macpherson leading the over 35 classification. PowerNet lead the teams classification.
After three days of sprint finishes, the focus of this year’s race switches to climbing with the 112km Queen stage from Mossburn to the Remarkables, near Queenstown. This year’s fourth stage includes an extended 10km category one climb and a gravel finish which is expected to be the biggest test of this year’s race.