Alejandro on the podium of the Tour of Oman

Alejandro on the podium of the Tour of Oman

Third in his first experience

Alejandro’s quotes:

“I jumped across with 3.5km remaining to see if I could improve my overall result. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, because we would be facing headwinds when we took a turn with 2.5km to go, so keeping a gap alive would be hard, but we had to try. I was brought back with 1.5km remaining, but I’m happy with my work today and throughout the whole week.”

“I didn’t know how I’d really respond on Friday – I actually knew I wasn’t feeling bad, more or less I was rolling good, but since Mallorca, I hadn’t climbed a long ascent, we had spent lots of days always on the big chanring and small gears… and Green Mountain was extremely hard. I didn’t feel good nor bad at all, just wasn’t able to find the right speed to tackle it. Still, I’m satisfied with the result: Rafa’s win was a strong show and Van Garderen had already been runner-up in this race a year ago, was really motivated to do well.”

“About what happened yesterday, I was going to be agree with the choice the whole collective took. It’s true that safety comes first, and obviously a descent like that, taken at 90-100kph, having to brake almost to stand – it would have made things really complicated, but I’m also a bit sad because I really felt well prior to the stage and we could have tried something to turn the GC upside down. We could have improved or worsened our final result, but I choice was taken not to continue and I was OK with it.”

“This tour around the desert was good, a beautiful experience. Now we will take some rest and then head to Strade Bianche and the Volta a Catalunya, which we’ll chain almost immediately with the classics.”