On Sunday, van Garderen, thanks to the BMC Racing Team, moved from third place to second during the team time trial.
Advertisement
Sky have the best all-round squad, which also includes climbers Nicholas Roche, Leopold Konig and Wout Poels, so the team is well balanced for all parts of today’s stage.
Alexis Vuillermoz claimed the first French win of the 102nd Tour, with Birmingham-born Irishman Dan Martin (Cannondale-Garmin) a frustrated second.
But many eyes will now be on Tejay Van Garderen, who was second to Froome at last month’s Criterium du Dauphine, and sits second overall at 12sec.
BMC have form this season in the team time trial, after winning the hard opening stage of the Tour of Romandie.
-Indo-Asian News Service pr/.
But he was relieved they had five together for the finish as he was happy afterwards, as the time of every team was taken off the fifth rider.
Tuesday’s 10th stage, a 167-kilometre (103.5-mile) trek from Tarbes, a town reputed for its love of rugby, is the first of three straight days of climbing in the Pyrenees that get progressively more hard.
Heading into Monday’s rest day, and the Pyrenees mountain climbs of next week, Froome leads Van Garderen by 12 seconds and Belgian rider Greg Van Avermaet – another BMC rider – by 27 seconds.
Froome’s attack did some damage, though, as Nibali crawled up at a sluggish pace.
Defending champion Vincenzo Nibali of Astana lost 10 seconds to the other members of the Big Four (Froome, Spain’s Alberto Contador and Colombian Nairo Quintana).
“With the team I have and what they have shown so far, we are pretty confident”, Van Garderen said. The final showdown will however be different with the climb up the Côte de Cadoudal coming at the end of a 28-kilometre team time-trial.
Froome still leads Slovakian Peter Sagan (Tinkoff-Saxo) by 11 seconds and American Tejay van Garderen (BMC Racing) by 13.
Having started the climb 5sec ahead of BMC, Sky missed out on the win by just one second.
The route, at 28 kilometres, is not too peculiar, although it’s still the longest since 2009, but the usual flat course has been littered with rolling roads, with two long drags, and the final climb up the Cote de Cadoual. Orica GreenEdge, which finished runner-up at the world championships, has only six riders left in its team, including the injured Michael Matthews.
The company in charge of providing the leaders’ jerseys at cycling’s biggest race sent two technicians to Brittany to take the 2013 Tour champion’s measurements on the eve of the race against the clock.
“That said, it’ll be your usual suspects battling it out for the stage win; under normal circumstances, it would be us, Etixx, BMC, Movistar, Astana and Sky”.
BMC will start the stage at 4:40 p.m., five minutes before Sky, the last team to set off.
“The difference between the teams time trial this year and the years before is that I’ve never seen a TTT so late in a Grand Tour”.
Advertisement
“It’s wonderful, they’re so passionate about their own people, and their own countrymen’s success”, team principal Douglas Ryder told The Associated Press. “Yellow would have been a bonus but this was the main goal”, Van Garderen said.
