Davide Piganzoli debuts Team Polti Kometa in Turkey and Jhonatan Restrepo gives Team Polti Kometa a boost in Colombia
Great week for our professional structure Team Polti Kometa. The squad enrolled in the ProTeam category, the second step of the current men’s professional cycling, opened its victory record this season with a double victory for the young Italian rider Davide Piganzoli. The Lombard cyclist, in his second year as a professional after two seasons in our U23 category, took his first victory as a professional (the first of the Team Polti Kometa project) on Saturday in the third stage of the Turkish Tour of Antalya. The day, with a high finish, saw a great performance of the rider, who won alone and took the provisional lead of the event. On Sunday, in the fourth and final stage of the race, Piganzoli was perfectly supported by the team and retained the leader’s jersey. Piga also finished as the best climber of the Tour of Antalya, while Giovanni Lonardi took the points classification.
The Tour of Antalya is a very dear race within the Foundation because in its first edition back in 2008, the first victory of a cyclist enrolled in the professional project of the Contador Foundation would come. The Italian Matteo Moschetti, then competing under the Polartec-Kometa banner, won the first stage of that edition and repeated days later in the fourth and final stage, which made him worthy of the secondary classification of points.Eritrean Awet Habtom, the best young rider of the race, finished third overall.In 2020, Italy’s Alessandro Fancellu finished third overall and, a year earlier, in the 2019 edition, Juan Pedro López finished fourth after coming close to victory in that year’s queen stage, where he finished second.
Sunday also brought with it the triumph of a rider from the professional structure on Colombian soil. Jhonatan Restrepo, one of the signings of this 2024, competed in the fourth edition of the Tour Colombia 2.1 as part of a Colombian team led by the sport director Carlos Mario Jaramillo. Restrepo would impose his top speed on his Aurum bike in the sixth and final stage of the race, a 138-kilometre stage finishing in the streets of Bogotá that was resolved in a sprint.
