Team dsm-firmenich animate Stage 3 of Vuelta a España

The first mountain stage at the Vuelta on Monday saw Team dsm-firmenich animate the day, setting a hard tempo and attempting to launch a counter attacking group over the penultimate climb with Romain Bardet.

Rolling out from Súria it was a fast start to the stage with multiple attacks in the peloton. The team were active in trying to make the break with Chris Hamilton particularly active in several moves that were brought back. Eventually the elastic snapped and an 11 rider group went clear with all Team dsm-firmenich riders in the peloton, attention switched to saving energy for later in the day. The breakaway were allowed to gain an advantage of almost five minutes but that slowly came back before holding steady at around three minutes as the race entered Andorra and hit the climb of Coll d’Ordino. After some good positioning and pacing work by Alberto Dainese, Lorenzo Milesi and Sean Flynn; Romain Combaud then brought the guys further forward once more before Hamilton took over at the head of the race.

Setting a strong tempo for multiple kilometres on the climb, Hamilton reduced the gap down to around two minutes before some other teams took it up and Jay Vine attacked. Bardet quickly latched onto his wheel and a potentially promising group formed but no-one wanted to pull and they were quickly caught. Sensing a slight lull, Bardet launched a strong attack and managed to get a gap over the peloton with Wilco Kelderman bridging across to him. Pulling out around five seconds or so, Kelderman didn’t rotate through due to having riders behind, and despite pushing on for a bit more, the chasing peloton brought Bardet back just before the top of the climb.

A sensible but fast descent followed, before the pace in the reduced bunch eased with Max Poole joining Bardet in there. That saw the break gain more time before the pace really increased in the final five kilometres which thinned things down dramatically. Bardet held on and fought for as long as possible, just having to let go of the GC group inside the flamme rouge before riding his own tempo to the line.

Speaking after the stage Bardet expressed: “Today we raced aggressively like we had planned. The guys did a great job and I was able to try to go clear on the penultimate climb. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, so I refocused on the final but a mechanical with one and a half kilometres to go held me back from the front group. We are looking forward to the sprint finish tomorrow.”

Team dsm-firmenich coach Phil West added: “We wanted to try for the stage win and also keep Max in the process of riding the GC. We knew that there was obviously going to be a bit of a fight in the final, so we wanted to see how far we could come as a team. We kept an eye on the break and tried to get Chris in there when the combination was right but when there were guys who are potential GC candidates, like Caruso for example, then there was no point in him being there as we expected the GC teams not to give them too much rope. Then we did some good teamwork and positioning to bring Romain and Max into the final. The boys did a really good job at that and we were present and where we needed to be coming into the climbs. Chris was able to make tempo on the Ordino so that Romain could try something over the top of it and anticipate, but we didn’t get any rope there which was a bit of shame. In the end it came to a shoot-out on the last climb. Unfortunately, Max wasn’t able to follow on the final climb today. Romain was in contention but he had a small mechanical issue with around one kilometre to go which meant that a gap opened up in front of him and he wasn’t able to come back. It’s a little bit of a shame but overall I’m happy with how the guys rode today as a team and we’ll try again in the next days.”