Tibor del Grosso steps up with a first professional victory: "I think a finish like this suits me well, and I showed that"

Two out of two for Alpecin-Deceuninck at the 2025 Tour of Turkey. Yesterday's victory of Simon Dehairs was backed up by his younger teammate Tibor del Grosso in an exciting finale of stage two where he outsprinted Giovanni Lonardi and Lander Loockx.

"We knew for sure that this would be a really good opportunity," he says in the flash interview after his victory. "We all believed in it, and the team worked really hard for it. They did a great job, so it's great to finish it off."

At Volta a Catalunya, the youngster already showed that he has a very fast sprint, when he came second behind British wonderkid Matthew Brennan. With a somewhat thinned out peloton, there were certainly good opportunities. "It was a very tough finish, that last kilometre was annoying. With the two climbs before that, there was a chance to drop the pure sprinters. I think a finish like this suits me well, and I showed that."

Today's stage was too much of a bite for pure sprinters with a ten-kilometer climb in the middle. Riders such as Del Grosso's teammate (and until today leader of GC) Simon Dehairs and Alexander Kristoff were far behind by the time peloton approached the finish city of Kalkan.

Therefore, many eyes were on Del Grosso. "I don't know if I was the top favorite, a few guys were dropped but there were still a lot of fast men in the group. But the guys just kept me in a good position, and then it was all about giving it until the finish. In the end I had the most left."

The young all-rounder started his sprint late, and that wasn't such a bad idea, with the difficult uphill finish line. Was that planned? "Not necessarily. I thought everyone still had something left, so I waited for the guy in front of me to accelerate, but no one went. That almost made me too late, but I was happy that I could still get past him. In the end, I won with a pretty good margin."

Is Del Grosso officially a road cyclist, or still a cyclo-crosser? "I'm both," he laughs. "It's my first win on the road, but I've been developing on the road for a few years, so it's not like it's my first road season," he concludes. With that, Dutch fans can still hope for Del Grosso to become the successor of Mathieu van der Poel in both disciplines.