After just over four hours in the saddle it came down to less than a bike length. Norway’s Alexander Kristoff won the sprint to the line to win the RideLondon-Surrey Classic, the richest prize in one‑day cycling. The race may have ended in the dash on the Mall most predicted but an outstanding display of breakaway riding by Matteo Trentin and Jasper Stuyven meant that with less than two kilometres to go it looked as if the main sprinters might have blown their opportunity to duke it out at the finish.

Kristoff, considering his team-mates were left to do all the heavy lifting in the chasing posse, was a worthy winner. Glued to the wheel of Bora-Hansgrohe’s Irish rider Sam Bennett in the closing 300 metres, he got the perfect lead-out to beat Orica-Scott’s Magnus Cort Nielsen and Team Sunweb’s Michael Matthews to the top step of the podium.

“My team did an amazing job to bring back the break at the end,” said Kristoff, who has had a mixed season and was still bearing the scars of a heavy fall during stage 17 of the Tour de France. “I was a bit concerned about the breakaway because we weren’t getting too much help. I don’t really know why because we haven’t been racing so great lately. My body’s still healing after a crash on the Tour. I was pretty banged up and I didn’t really know how good I would be.”

Despite a prize fund of €100,000 (£89,500), there was something of a reserve and youth‑team feel to an event following so hot on the heels of the Tour. Most of the teams on the start list will have been familiar to those with a passing interest in the sport, unlike many of the cyclists representing them. Kristoff, Matthews, Jack Bauer (Quick-Step Floors), Daryl Impey (Orica-Scott) and André Greipel (Lotto Soudal) were among the more high profile, while Peter Kennaugh was the best known of the seven riders representing Team Sky.

Starting on Horse Guards Parade, the route took in Kingston and Hampton Court before crossing the Thames to Surrey and its short, sharp climbs. Staple Lane, Leith Hill, Ranmore Common and the zigzags of Box Hill had to be negotiated before the riders headed through Leatherhead, Oxshott and Esher and back towards central London alongside the Thames. Approaching Kingston, with the road split by bollards, they briefly met some of the 25,000 considerably slower participants in the day’s London-Surrey 100 coming the other way.

After 60km, a five-man breakaway – quickly reduced to three on the first punchy climbs – had been allowed to establish a carefully controlled gap of up to four minutes on the peloton; grist to the mill of the sprinters. Iljo Keisse, Mads Würtz Schmidt and Twan Castelijns made up the remnants of a suicide squad that always looked doomed but the trio will have been happy enough to sweep up some of the king of the mountains bounty on offer.

With Sky having shovelled enough coal into the furnace to close the gap and cause multiple fractures in the peloton, Trentin, Impey and Kennaugh put 16 seconds between themselves and a chasing bunch of 14 riders, including Matthews, a winner of two stages and the green jersey in France. Looking deep in the red and shouting repeatedly into his radio, the Sky man was soon dropped and his fellow escapees were joined by the Belgian Trek-Segafredo rider Jasper Stuyven, now one of three strong riders at the head of the race. Katusha-Alpecin’s Nils Politt and Rick Zabel were left to tow the chasing posse as the kilometres flew by.

On the return trip towards Kingston, the three-man breakaway had a gap of 33 seconds and rising on a chasing group boasting several Trek-Segafredo and Quick Step-Floors riders who were understandably unprepared to put in the hard yards required to close it with only 20km to go. They could not possibly hang on, could they? In a word: no. Impey was the first to crack and despite their heroic attempts to stay clear, Trentin and Stuyven were finally reeled in at the knockings. “You can see from the sprint I was really strong and nobody was really close,” Kristoff said. “I was a bit frustrated in the Tour and I knew it would be difficult on the Champs Élysées after my big crash.”

On the Mall, with his recuperating rival Mark Cavendish looking on from the finish line, he made it look easy.