Roman Kreuziger – Unofficial
Roman showed a brilliant performance in the 4th stage of the Tirreno-Adriatico after having attacked with 6km to go just to work for his team captain Alberto Contador who eventually won the stage. Roman finished in the fourth.
“The stage went down as we had planned it. I agreed with Alberto that it would be a good idea if I jumped away and made the race more difficult for the riders, which finally happened. All of a sudden, there was no waiting game going on and the group behind started chasing me down,” described Roman who built a gap of more than 20 seconds but was caught with 1km to go.
I eased off a little bit at the end just in case Alberto needed my help. Thanks to his victory he got bonus seconds in the finish and got closer to Kwiatkowski in the GC. He is a really strong rival but before the race we said that we wanted to win the race and we are doing everything to succeed in this mission. Every second counts. Tomorrow´s stage features a really steep uphill finish and then there is a time trial coming on Tuesday and I think that the gaps among the best riders will be really small. So we keep on fighting.”
His heroic performance was even more rewarding as he had to cope with a flat tire. “One of my teammates gave me his rear wheel. It happened at the most inconvenient moment. It cost me a lot of energy to get across to the front group. Luckily, we still had 60km of racing ahead of us. On the downhill I had a bite of food and managed to overcome a small crisis so that I had enough strength for the finale,” he revealed.