The Tour de Pologne has only been part of UCI WorldTour since 2005 but it has developed and grown at a rapid pace and is now one of the best stage races of the season. As a consequence, Polish cycling has also grown, with Rafal Majka winning the 2014 edition of the Tour de Pologne and Michal Kwiatkowski ending a hugely successful 2014 season with his UCI World Champion title in the road race.
Majka won the 2014 Tour de Pologne with a brave display of racing despite being tired after a tough but successful Tour de France with his Tinkoff-Saxo team. He won both the Strbske Pleso and the Bukowina Tatrzanska mountain stages but only gained a handful of seconds on Spanish pair Benat Intxausti and Jon Izaguirre of Movistar. Yet it proved enough during the final time trial stage and the Polish fans cheered Majka onto victory. He lost ten seconds to Intxausti during the 25km time trial around Kraków but won overall by eight seconds. Majka was the first Polish rider to win his national tour since Cezary Zamana in 2003 and is the first Polish winner since the race became part of the UCI WorldTour.
Majka and Kwiatkowski represent the new generation of Polish riders but the Tour de Pologne owes much of its current success to Czeslaw Lang, one of the most successful riders from the seventies and eighties. He won a silver medal in the road race at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow and then enjoyed a successful professional career in Italy, winning a stage of the 1986 Giro d'Italia. Lang took over the organisation of the Tour de Pologne in 1993, investing his career earnings to revive the race and turn it around. It had been a historically important race since the first edition in 1928 but had declined during the latter years of communism.
Lang has grown and developed the race year on year and it is now broadcast live on television around the world and attracts many of the riders looking for success and UCI WorldTour points in the second half of the season.
“I would like to thank all of you, especially the cyclists,” Lang said after signing a new agreement to televise the race in Poland for the next five years. “You have made my dreams come true. 21 years ago we started with the Tour de Pologne in a new format. We built a great theatre and waited a long time for the actors; now we have spectacular, great actors. That is something amazing.”
The 2014 edition of the Tour de Pologne celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Solidarność protests and the eventual transformation of Poland from communism to a democracy. In 2015 the race will be able to celebrate the success of Rafal Majka, World Champion Michal Kwiatkowski and Polish cycling as a whole.