Tour de Hongrie opens with a chaotic sprint and Peron just outside the top 20

Head Sports Director Massimo Podenzana:

“Well, I think it’s fair to say that today woke the legs up! It was a pretty hard stage and like all the races we have done this year, it was very fast. We had two objectives today, we wanted to get up the road in the breakaway to try and have a chance of getting in the KOM jersey like last year and secondly to help Mehdi over the climbs and support him in the sprint at the end.”

“Three guys went away after around 30kilometers and we weren’t there, so Charles tried to bridge across, but those guys weren’t waiting and around and it was too much for him to do alone.

“By that point we knew we had left it too late to get any of the available KOM points and had to settle for trying to go for something in the sprint. Mehdi was caught too far back, so Andrea tried his best, but it was very hectic, and he was a little short of the top 20 guys.”

Andrea Peron

“We all tried to get something going with a breakaway right from the start today, but because of the early intermediate sprint the bunch didn’t want to let anything go and when the trio went, we were too far back and Charles tried to make it over, but he was wasting too much energy stuck in the middle on his own.”

“The final sprint was quite chaotic, fast and technical before the line and we initially wanted to work for Mehdi, but he had to hit the brakes on the last corner and fell back. I tried to adjust and move up to have a chance of the top ten, but there just wasn’t enough road. For sure we will try again tomorrow, every stage apart from Saturday will most likely end in a sprint and that’s three more chances for us.”