Greg Van Avermaet was one of the big favourites for the Grand Prix Montreal. However, the Belgian had to settle for 7th after he had been poorly positioned for the sprint.

BMC Racing Team's Greg Van Avermaet finished seventh Sunday at Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal as Simon Gerrans (ORICA-GreenEDGE) became the first rider to win both WorldTour races in Canada in the five-year history of the races. Van Avermaet said as the race neared the U-turn leading to the uphill finish in the final kilometer, he found himself too far back of the Australian national road champion, who won Friday's Grand Prix Cycliste in Québec City.

"The perfect position would have been on Gerrans's wheel, but there was a big fight for it," Van Avermaet said. "So it was really hard to get out of the wind. I felt I did a sprint of 600 meters in the wind. I was giving it everything to the finish, but it was impossible to do better than this."

Gerrans took the win ahead of world road champion Rui Costa (Lampre-Merida) and Tony Gallopin (Lotto-Belisol). Van Avermaet's seventh place followed his fifth-place result Friday in Québec City and was his fifth top 10 finish in six races in Canada the past three years.

Van Avermaet had solid help from several teammates throughout the race, BMC Racing Team Sport Director Jackson Stewart said, particularly on the last of 17 trips around the 12.1-km circuit in the 205.7-km race. In the final six kilometers, USA Pro Challenge winner Tejay van Garderen chased down an attack by Costa before Brent Bookwalter helped move Van Avermaet forward immediately after re-joining the front group.

"We had a strong team and we had numbers at the end there and we had to watch the moves," Stewart said. "Greg was strong. In the end, he had a bad wheel for the sprint and he got too much wind and did not get the result he could have. We still did a good race and executed well, but of course we wanted to have done better."