Roman Kreuziger – Unofficial
“The time loss is no big deal and we more or less expected a gap like that. We anticipated that HTC would take the win but they shouldn´t pose a threat in the GC. We lost some 30 seconds on Liquigas and Lampre, which is fine,” Roman said.
“We could have finished by 10 seconds faster but Jufre had a small mechanical after the start. The most important thing is that we didn’t crash and crossed the finish line all together. It was just an opening stage and I don’t think it will count much later on. 20 seconds difference doesn’t mean anything in the mountains. For this reason, I remain relaxed and I´m pleased with my today´s performance. I was feeling great and I even took some longer turns,” the Astana´s leader added. “The tomorrow´s stage is likely to end in a bunch sprint. It is the longest stage of this year´s edition, almost 250km long. I hope we will have no problems.”
1st stage (19.3 km): 1st HTC-Highroad 20:59, 2nd RadioShack +10, 3rd Liquigas, 4th Lotto +22, 5th Garmin, 6th Lampre +24, 7th Rabobank +26, 8th Saxo Bank +30, … 17th Astana +50.
Overall: 1st Pinotti (Ita), 2nd Bak (Den), 3rd Sivcov (Bel), 4th Cavendish (GBr), 5th Lewis (USA) HTC-Highroad, … 125th Roman Kreuziger (Cze/Astana) +50.