John Lieswyn successfully defended his yellow jersey today at the Grand Prix Cycliste de Beauce on the tough Mont Megantic stage, finishing second to former Beauce winner Tomas Konecny, who moved up to second in the general classification.

Lieswyn credited his 7UP-Maxxis teammates with inspiring him to ride so well on the feared final climb, which reaches 18 percent in places. "I'm just happy that I didn't let the team down,” he said. “The closer I got to Megantic, the more pressure I felt, because the guys were killing themselves for me. They gave me the confidence and inspiration to do it."

The 172km stage began with attacks, as riders tried to establish a break. Usually, the break gets swallowed on the final climb, but occasionally it manages to stay away, or put some of the breakaways in a position to finish well up in the field.

At the 30km mark, the right mixture of riders managed to get away and quickly rode to a three-minute advantage. After stalling for a time, the gap then went up again to a maximum of five minutes by the 100km point. In the break were Cory Lange (Canadian National) Lubos Kejval (Ed's System–ZVVZ), David McKenzie (Flanders-iteamnova.com), Oleg Grishkine (Navigators), Jason Lokkesmoe (Health Net), Chris Isaac (Canadian National) and Martin St-Laurent (Volkswagen–Trek).

7UP was riding tempo behind, making sure that the gap didn't go much over five minutes, and with 40km to go Prime Alliance came up to help reduce the gap. As the gap began to drop, Kejval attacked the rest of the break, with only Grishkine able to match his speed. The pair, with Kejval doing most of the work, quickly took the time split back to five minutes for a while, but the peloton began to gradually whittle down their lead as the race entered the final 20km.

The duo started the main climb, at 5km to go, with a lead of 1:20, and Grishkine staved off the inevitable capture for another kilometer by dropping his breakaway companion. However, he was also caught and dropped by a lead group of seven riders, containing Lieswyn, Konecny and his teammate Petr Bencik, Dominique Perras (Flanders–Iteamnova.com), Danny Pate (Prime Alliance), Chris Baldwin (Navigators) and Antonio Aldape (Tecos–Mercurio).

ZVVZ looked to be in the driver’s seat, with both the third- and fifth-place GC riders at the front. The pair took turns attacking Lieswyn, but he easily covered every move, not faltering, and even launching one brief move of his own.

"Because ZVVZ had two riders in the group, I had to be conservative," explained Lieswyn. "I made the one attack just to let them know that I wasn't going to roll over."

Konecny made his final move in the last 1500 meters, and only Lieswyn was able to respond. At that point, the Czech rider admitted that he had resigned himself to going for the stage win. "I tried my best, but Lieswyn was very good today, and I knew that the best I could do was try to win this stage."

Bencik finished third on the stage and will move to third overall, while Baldwin drops to fourth after finishing fifth on Megantic, and Eric Wohlberg (Canadian National) falls to sixth from fourth overall, with Pate moving up from sixth to fifth in the standings. All of these riders are within 1:15 of the lead, and Konecny, Bencik, Pate and Wohlberg are all good time trialists, so Saturday's 15km race against the clock could be very interesting.