Jonathan Milan lives up to the hype with dominant sprint win on stage 2 of 2025 Criterium du Dauphiné

In a frantic and chaotic bunch sprint finale, Lidl-Trek's Jonathan Milan has powered to an expectedly dominant stage 2 victory at the 2025 Criterium du Dauphiné.

With just Paul Ourselin of Cofidis forming the breakaway of the day, the peloton were quite content to allow a rather large time gap by modern standards, with the 31-year-old Frenchman building to more than six minutes clear early on. By the time Ourselin reached the final 100k of the day though, his lead had already started to be cut, with the time gap now around four minutes.

As that gap started to come down quickly however, some counter-attacks reignited the fight at the front of the peloton and the trio of Romain Combaud, Christopher Juul-Jensen and Victor Guernalec all bridged the gap to join Ourselin in the break.

As things broke apart again on the Cat 2 Côte du Château de Buron, both the break and the peloton split. Up ahead, Juul-Jensen and Guernalec proved the strongest of the leaders, whilst behind, Lidl-Trek's sprint powerhouse Jonathan Milan was the most notable rider caught out in the second part of the peloton. With 44km to go, the remainder of the break was then swallowed up by the bunch, as the likes of Milan and those other dropped riders got back on at the back of the bunch shortly after.

With everything calming down after the race came back together, a bunch sprint finish was looking very likely as they entered the final 30km. Ahead of the final categorised climb of the day though, the pace really started to ramp up again, with Team Visma | Lease a Bike refusing to let any other team take to the front of the peloton.

On that climb, Romain Bardet, taking part in the final race of his career attempted a solo attack. By the top of the climb though, the Frenchman only had 10 seconds and with around 17km to go, Bardet's chances looked slim. Just inside the final 10km, his dreams of a final win being added to his palmares today were over.

With 2km to go, it was still UAE Team Emirates - XRG on the front of the peloton, with the sprint teams keeping themselves in the shadows. Finally though, at around 1.3km to go, Lidl-Trek started to take control. As the sprints then opened it was all about Lidl-Trek's Jonathan Milan as the Italian powered to a dominant win ahead of Fred Wright and Mathieu van der Poel.