"Five Seconds Held, Sosa Could Not Get Off The Wheel On The Anıtkabir Ramp, And The 36-Year Caja Rural Wait For A Major Stage Race Overall Is Over" — Berwick Wins 2026 Tour Of Turkey, Aniołkowski Takes The Closing Ankara Sprint, Sosa Holds Second On GC
Sebastian Berwick has won the 2026 Presidential Cycling Tour of Turkey, defending the five-second turquoise jersey he carried into the closing Ankara circuit and finishing safely in the bunch as Stanisław Aniołkowski took the Stage 8 win on the line. The 26-year-old Australian's overall delivers the first major stage-race victory for Caja Rural-Seguros RGA since the team's foundation in its current form, ending a 36-year wait for the Spanish ProTeam that traces its lineage back to the 1990 Kelme operation.
The day had unfolded exactly as the morning bus briefing had projected. The 108km closing stage, eleven laps of an 8.6km circuit through central Ankara with the 600-metre 6% Anıtkabir ramp on each lap, was always going to come down to a bunch sprint unless a pre-final-lap split tried to take advantage of the finish ramp's downhill exit into the Atatürk Bulvarı drag. No split came. The peloton stayed together for the full eleven laps, the bonification sprint at the third-lap intermediate went to Diego Ulissi with no GC implication, and the closing sprint was contested cleanly.
Aniołkowski, the Cofidis sprinter who had been the priced 5/2 outright on the morning briefing, took his second Tour of Turkey stage win of the week — adding to his Stage 2 Konya victory — by holding off Davide Ballerini, who had won the rain-soaked Antalya stage on Saturday. Madis Mihkels took third for EF Education-EasyPost, with Dylan Groenewegen fourth and Giacomo Nizzolo rounding out the top five for Q36.5.
The GC story was the only story. Berwick had taken the turquoise jersey from Iván Sosa on Friday's Stage 7 Feslıkan summit, attacking at 2.6km from the line and crossing eight seconds clear, and the morning briefing had been clear that defending five seconds in the Ankara circuit would require the Caja Rural team to ride the front of the peloton for the entire 108km. The team did exactly that — Jefferson Cepeda, Joel Nicolau Beltran and Orluis Aular rotating on the front from kilometre zero, with no Movistar attempt to get Sosa into a split that the morning briefing had explicitly suggested would be the only realistic GC threat.
Sosa held second on GC at five seconds, with Christian Bagatin — the Jayco-AlUla climber whose maiden professional win on the Feslıkan queen stage had been the surprise of the race — confirmed third overall at 1:42. The classification jerseys were settled with no late changes: Davide Ballerini takes the Points jersey on the strength of two stage wins, Bagatin takes the Mountains classification, and Wilco Kelderman the Best Combative Rider award after his three-stage breakaway block in Stages 4, 5 and 6.
For Berwick, the win is the breakthrough of his career — a first stage-race overall, a first victory at HC level, and the consolidation of a three-year programme at Israel Premier Tech and now Caja Rural-Seguros RGA that has had the Tour of Turkey on the wall as the spring 2026 deliverable since November. The Australian was visibly emotional in the post-race interview, telling Eurosport "this race has been on my calendar for two years, and to deliver it for a team that has been waiting 36 years for this is the result of my career."
For Caja Rural-Seguros RGA, the win is the stage-race overall the team has been priced into for at least three editions of the race, having put Oscar Cabedo on the GC podium in 2024 and Cepeda on the GC podium in 2025. The team's celebration in Ankara stretched into the evening, with general manager Eusebio Unzué making his post-race media call from the team bus and confirming that the 2026 Vuelta a España wildcard, which has not yet been formally confirmed, "should now follow."
The Tour of Turkey closes the spring 2.HC stage-race calendar in the men's peloton, and the focus immediately rotates to the Giro d'Italia, which rolls out from Nessebar on Friday 8 May. Aular, Cepeda and Caja Rural-Seguros RGA's wildcard hope for the Giro is now the most credible Spanish-licensed wildcard story of the spring; the team will know its Giro wildcard fate in the next 48 hours.