Tour de France stage one victor Rohan Dennis has created a massive immediate challenge for himself.
Advertisement
Not that the 25 year-old Australian will baulk at showing after his success in Saturday’s 13.8km time trial in the Dutch city of Utrecht, that he has the climbing prowess he will need to if he is to challenge for a win in the Giro d’Italia, Tour or Vuelta a Espana.
The 2015 Tour de France is only into its second stage but already there’s more than 90 seconds between four big favourites for the general classification – Chris Froome (Sky), Alberto Contador (Tinkoff-Saxo), Vincenzo Nibali (Astana) and Nairo Quintana (Movistar).
Cavendish was also passed by Trek Factory Racing’s Cancellara, in a result that saw the Swiss rider take third on the stage gaining a four-second time bonus. “Not being at the classics was not a good thing for my motivation”.
The eventual victor of this was Fabien Cancellara who made up for disappoitment in the Stage 1 time trail to pul on hte yellow jersey for the 29th time in his career. “I’ve gassed it. It’s disappointing”. “They gave me pain killers last night, I had my best sleep ever, didn’t want to wake up”.
“I’m just glad it worked out the way it did and I had the support from my team-mates when I really needed it”, Froome said.
That was Froome’s verdict, too. But he might have expected to have been first across the line.
“We’re ahead today but there’s lots in store for us for the rest of the week”.
Froome, the 2013 champion who crashed out previous year, sounded surprised to have built such a lead on Nibali but was not getting carried away.
When not in time trial mode, the peloton would let the day’s break establish and the sprinter’s teams would chase it down and contest the bunch sprint finish. “The differences aren’t important”.
“Potentially”, he said. “The wind seemed to pick up a bit later on”. “Today was a tough day out. I will try, knowing that it’s going to be a long way to the finish”. “The longer efforts are where my training is geared towards”.
“It went that way, but it took me a while to be 100 percent happy with that decision”.
Welshman Thomas is actually ahead of Froome in the standings at fifth overall and 35sec behind Cancellara. “All we were missing was Rohan”, said van Garderen. “In the last kilometer, I calculated that I would be in the yellow jersey”.
By 120 kilometres to go, the pace was high, with several teams pulling on the front to avoid a crash, as the winds started to howl and they started to be hindered by some road furniture.
Now everything is a bonus, said Cancellara, who finished third in Saturdays opening stage amid punishingly hot conditions.
The German revealeved that he considered Cavendish and Sagan his main rivals for the sprint and that he tried to stay under the radar earlier in the day, while doing the work when it counted the most.
Advertisement
It seems that Tour karma evened the score Sunday.
