"A Messy Çeşme Sprint, A Catch Inside The Last Kilometre, And A Third 2026 Win For The Twenty-Year-Old From Lokeren" — Tom Crabbe Storms To Tour Of Turkey 2026 Stage 1 Victory In Selçuk
Tom Crabbe — the 20-year-old Flanders-Baloise sprinter who has spent the spring stamping his name on the 2.Pro circuit — opened his Presidential Cycling Tour of Türkiye account on Sunday afternoon with a perfectly-timed bunch sprint in Selçuk, holding off Simon Dehairs (Tudor Pro Cycling) and Davide Persico (Polti VisitMalta) over a 148.7-kilometre opening stage from the Aegean port of Çeşme. The Belgian completed the day in 3:23:57 to claim his third victory of the 2026 season and the leader's turquoise jersey of the Tour of Türkiye.
The day looked, for nearly four hours, like one for the breakaway. A nine-rider escape group containing Konya Torku Şekerspor's Veli Çelebi, KZ-Cycling's Said Said, and Q36.5 Pro Cycling's Mark Donovan among others rolled clear at kilometre nine and built a maximum lead of 5'40" by the second intermediate sprint. The peloton — driven by Flanders-Baloise on the front for the final 60 kilometres — closed the gap progressively through the rolling Aegean coastline. The catch came inside the final kilometre, a chaotic chase-down that left several sprinters out of position as the bunch swung onto the long Selçuk finish straight.
Crabbe was perfectly positioned. With 200 metres to go, the young Belgian opened a half-bike-length gap on Tudor's Dehairs and never relinquished it, finishing two bike lengths clear at the line. "It was super messy in the final," Crabbe said in his post-race podium interview. "I lost my last lead-out man with three kilometres to go and had to find Simon Dehairs's wheel. He went a bit early — I just had the legs to come over him." Persico crossed third at the same time, Italian sprinter Filippo Baroncini fourth, and Soudal-Quick Step's debutant Tommaso Cretti rounded out the top five.
The result is Crabbe's third win of 2026 after his back-to-back stage victories at the Tour of Antalya in February and his maiden WorldTour win at the GP Industria & Artigianato di Larciano on 8 March. The 20-year-old from Lokeren — a former track sprinter who switched to the road full-time at the start of 2025 — has now claimed eleven UCI wins in his career and slots into the leader's jersey at a 2.Pro race for the first time. Flanders-Baloise team manager Hendrik Redant called it "a perfect opening stage — Tom timed it to the metre."
The wider GC picture is, on a stage like Sunday's, of secondary interest: all the favourites for the seven-day Türkiye GC — including Egan Bernal, who is not at this race; the climbing references on the startlist are Mauri Vansevenant (Soudal-Quick Step), Eddie Dunbar (Team Jayco AlUla) and Kazakh GC specialist Nans Peters — finished safely in the bunch. The mountains stages on the Türkiye route this year are clustered Wednesday through Friday, with the Stage 4 summit finish at Antalya the likely GC pivot.
The race continues Monday with Stage 2, a 178-kilometre rolling day from Aydın to Marmaris that includes a category-3 climb 12 kilometres from the line — a profile that on paper suits Crabbe but that several pure sprinters in the field, including Caja Rural's Iván Cobo and Trinity Racing's Joel Suter, will hope to close down. The Türkiye organiser confirmed Sunday evening that the race will continue to its Mediterranean GC finale in Istanbul on 3 May, with the closing ITT through Sultanahmet a 14.6-kilometre flat course expected to favour the Tudor Pro Cycling and INEOS Grenadiers GC riders.
For Crabbe — who turns 21 in October and whose 2026 contract with Flanders-Baloise expires at the end of this season — Sunday's win is also a transfer-market exhibit. Two WorldTour teams have been linked publicly with his next contract; one Tour-organisation source confirmed Sunday evening that Decathlon-CMA CGM and Lotto-Intermarché have both filed exploratory enquiries through the rider's agent Karel Jonckheere. The Türkiye stage one win — and the leader's jersey — sharpens the bidding.