Kids were out in force at the start where each class visited their adopted team.
Steven Cozza (Garmin-Chiptole)
“It [the moustache] started to go out of style, I was tired of eating hair with my food. Plus that Italian racer started growing his and kind of ruined it, I had to share it off.”
“It’s going to be a battle, we’re going to be riding in the front, it’s going to be really painful but I think we’re strong enough and we can do it. ”
George Hincapie (Columbia) puts in an attack in the first kilometers
Garmin-Chipotle team leading the field at the second KOM
Christan Vande Velde (Garmin-Chipotle)
“I was concerned all day. It was a brutally hard day and they threw everything at us, the team did a great job. There was no respite at all today. we want just trying to control it as much as we can. The strategy is to keep control of the race and not let anybody go.”
Dominique Rollin (Toyota-United), KOM
” tomorrow there’s only one KOM in the stage and I have a good enough lead to not worry about those points and just maybe hope for a little breakaway to take over those points and we can relax and wait for the final in the sprint. I think we build enough lead on the points scale so this way we can just keep on going for our ultimate goal, a stage win in this year’s edition.”
Mike Barry (Columbia), stage winner and Most Agressive
Our strategy today was to make the race as hard as possible for Garmin. We have a couple of guys that are very close in the classification and we’d like to wrestle it away from Christian. We have to make the race as hard as possible, to isolate him and we managed to do that towards the end of the race and we kept attacking until the end and I found myself in position to go for the stage win. The team rode really well today and really it could have been any of the guys with the opportunity to go for the victory, it just happened to be me to attack, I attacked at the right time and got away.
Eric Baumann (Sparkasse), second on stage
“A really tough stage, all the time up and down, very fast. My team did a really good job, we were able to put guys in the big breakaway and at the end, only one guy was stronger than us. For us, it’s okay second place.”
“We do all the time in Europe the races, then we had a chance to come over here and we want to keep this chance so we can come in the nest years with these nice tours. I am only here for bikes, baby clothes and gap for my kids (laughs). ”
All photos copyright Lyne Lamoureux
