The Tour of California keeps going up. In the fifth stage the riders had to overcome a lot of altitude again. The Let Tom Skuijns was the strongest and won the stage. Styby and his team defended the leader’s jersey from Julian Alaphilippe successfully.
“Today it was actually 212 kilometer uphill. Terrible. We went from sea level up to 2.600 meters. In the beginning we had to control the race and ensure that no one would escape that was a threat to the general classification.”
The same tactics as yesterday. “And we succeeded again in our plan. Even more, with Maxim Bouet and Nikolas Maes we had two guys of our team in the breakaway. Maxim was the best placed rider in the general classification. We couldn’t imagine a better plan.”
“In the final we had to help Julian to defend his jersey and we succeeded. Julian finished seventh and will start tomorrow as the leader in the time trial. I don’t even have my time trial bike with me here, so I will just take it as a training.”