Greipel takes the 1st Tour of Luxembourg stage

Andre Greipel (Lotto Belisol) had his sprint train firing on all cylinders as they delivered the German to a position where he could take out the 1st stage of the Tour of Luxembourg. Michael Morkov (Tinkoff Saxo) and Danny van Poppel (Trek Factory Racing) would be the riders finishing in 2nd and 3rd place respectively. van Poppel would also retain the yellow leaders jersey he pulled on after yesterdays prologue.

Boris Dron (Wallonie Bruxelles), Giuseppe Fonzi (Neri Sottoli) Juan Pablo Valencia (Colombia) were 3 riders who would try their luck in the breakaway today. Escaping in the opening kilometers, the trio built up a maximum lead of just over 4 minutes but with the a strong Lotto Belisol team present, the Belgian team were going to make sure the race ended in a mass sprint. The trio did put up a valiant fight though as they were only caught with 3km to go.

Team MTN-Qhubeka p/b Samsung had a largely uneventful day as they waited to set Andreas Stauff up for the sprint while also keeping our GC contenders out of trouble. In the end, Stauff got caught up behind the frenzy of the bunch sprint and wasnt really able to do his sprint. All our riders still finished safely in the peloton though and look forward to the tougher stages that are to come. That being said, Gerdemann crossed the line in 13th and Stauff in 17th today.

Rider – Andreas Stauff

The stage was controlled all day and the team rode really really well together. We are growing more and more as unit and riding in support of one another much better with each race. The race ended with 4 laps of a circuit that had a climb with around 5km to go. We were well positioned for each ascent but unfortunately the pace wasn’t high enough so the rush to the finish was quite chaotic. We are a lot better when the finale is hard so maybe we should have gone to the front and sped things up on the climb.

Nevertheless, we somehow found a way to the front but with a kilometer to go i tried surge forward but a spectator was trying to take a picture on the side of the road and was in the way. I tried to jump up to the front again but with the technical finish it was not possible and i finished somewhere around 20th position. Linus was on the other side of the peloton and even finished in front of me, so he didn’t lose time and now we are looking forward to getting a good GC result here.

Tomorrows finish is uphill so maybe Daniel or Jaco can have a go there, even Linus could have a chance tomorrow.

Directeur Sportif – Michel Cornelisse

Today there was a break of 3 riders and we didn’t put any of our riders in this break. It was quite a slow race because of the headwind all day. In the sprint finish we were riding for Stauff but at 500m to go he was caught a bit out of position. All our riders finished safely in the bunch though so we look forward to the next few days.

Stage Results