Sunny summer days must have felt a million miles away to the riders of the 2018 Tour of Guangxi peloton on stage 2 of the race on Wednesday. Torrential rain began to fall an hour into the three-hour, 145.2km stage from Beihai to Qinzhou, causing crashes and abandons. While Bora-Hansgrohe`s Pascal Ackermann made short work of the conditions to win the stage in a bunch sprint, Richie Porte ended his career with BMC Racing by abandoning on the stage, and will next be seen in the colours of Trek-Segafredo in 2019. `I think the stage unfolded how we expected it would, even without the heavy rain before the bunch sprint, and in that sense it was a relatively straightforward day,` BMC directeur sportif Jackson Stewart said on the team`s website. `The weather definitely made it a difficult day for everyone in the peloton, though.ADVERTISEMENT `No, he didn´t say anything really,` Stewart said with regards to Porte`s abandon. `We didn`t plan on Richie stopping and, of course, it`s now not ideal to be down to five riders, but we`ll continue to push on and see what we can get out of the next four stages.` The stage was animated by a four-man breakaway made up of Andrey Grivko (Astana), UAE Team Emirates` Yousif Mirza, Chun-Kai Feng (Bahrain-Merida), Quick-Step`s Rémi Cavagna and Great Britain`s Alex Dowsett (Katusha-Alpecin). The quintet worked well together, but as the weather conditions continued to take their toll, Cavagna pushed on alone, and was only finally caught inside the last four kilometres, where Ackermann`s Bora-Hansgrohe team took over.
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