The team time trial in Perereux on day 3 of the Tour Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes was thrilling and delivered with a special format that will also serve as the opener of the Tour de France next month in Barcelona. Netcompany Ineos led at the intermediate checkpoints but Visma Lease a Bike surged to victory after 28.4 kilometres of tactical racing. Matteo Jorgenson claimed the uphill finale for Visma, the American posting a time of 32:52 to take victory by nine seconds over their British rivals. EF Education round out the podium with Alex Baudin defending his yellow and blue leader’s jersey after losing 29 seconds.
“Winning as a team is seven times better than winning on your own, because we get the moments right afterwards together which in cycling you don’t often get. It’s a really cool discipline and a really nice day.
We lost Wout pretty early, he was not feeling super. Then Ben flatted and almost crashed on the main descent of the day. That was a hairy moment. But I think we adapted well to the situation and we could rearrange things, readjust, and I think the last 10 kilometres downhill we couldn’t have gone any faster. Bruno, Edo, Per were all incredibly strong. I was given a free ride to the last climb.”
-Matteo Jorgenson (Visma)
“I thought I could keep the leader’s jersey. Credit must go to my teammates. They really gave it their all; I only had 800 metres to cover. They put themselves on the line and clocked an incredible time. You could really feel the pace was fast all the way through and it was brilliant to witness from the inside. The jersey gave us a bit of extra motivation, even though we had a very strong team for a team time trial anyway.
The next two stages are fairly favourable for keeping the jersey. Then, the finish at Crest-Voland is quite tough, but it’s on home turf, so if I still have the jersey, it might give me wings - you never know.”
-Alex Baudin
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