photo credit @ BMC Racing – Twitter
BMC Racing claimed opening stage, the team time trial, of this year’s Vuelta a España on today, beating Tinkoff-Saxo by just one second, while Orica-GreenEdge rounded out the podium in third spot – with the same time.
Despite teams racing against the clock, today’s times will not count towards the general classification, following the UCI’s decision to neutralize the stage due to safety concerns regarding the route.
“Being world champions, that gives us a certain responsibility to put it out on the line and go for it,” Tejay van Garderen said at the end of the stage. “The tactic that we had was perfect. On a course like this you can’t really go much faster with more than five guys so we picked five guys to bring it to the end and we had three guys to line it out from the start and do a one kilo effort full gas and pull off. Then the five guys at the end hammered it to the line. To be honest, I don’t remember much of it, it went by so quickly. We’re super happy with the win and I couldn’t be happier for Peter Velits to take the jersey.”
Meanwhile, Team Sky’s Chris Froome began his bid for a rare Tour de France-Vuelta double with a relatively modest performance workout in today’s opening stage into the southern resort of Marbella.
Sky appeared to be more focused on avoiding mishaps and saving energy for tomorrow’s second stage as the team came home in 20th place out of 22.
Stage 1 TTT Results 1 BMC Racing 8:10 2 Tinkoff-Saxo 8:11 + 1 3 Orica-GreenEdge 8:11 + 1 4 LottoNL-Jumbo 8:18 + 7 5 Etixx-QuickStep 8:20 + 10 6 Trek Factory Racing 8:21 + 11 7 Lotto-Soudal 8:28 + 18 8 Caja Rural – Seguros RGA 8:28 + 18 9 Movistar 8:34 + 24 10 Cofidis, Solutions Crédit 8:37 + 27 11 IAM Cycling 8:37 + 27 12 Lampre-Meirda 8:37 + 27 13 Astana 8:40 + 30 14 MTN-Qhubeka 8:40 + 30 15 Team Colombia 8:43 + 33 16 FDJ 8:54 + 44 17 Katusha 9:04 + 54 18 AG2R-La Mondiale 9:10 + 1:00 19 Giant-Alpecin 9:17 + 1:07 20 Team Sky 9:21 + 1:11 21 Team Cannondale 9:30 + 1:20 22 Team Europcar 10:25 + 2:15
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