After yesterday’s queen stage, today’s final stage offered the last opportunity to shake up the GC at the end of a tough week of racing in the Alps. Throughout the day, Chris Hamilton, Gijs Leemreize and Romain Bardet all went on the attack for Team dsm-firmenich PostNL, but everything was brought back together in the end. In the final, Romain tried to get clear several times and caused some splits within the last ten kilometres, but his efforts were not rewarded and everything came down to a reduced bunch sprint. Giving it all to the line, Romain sprinted to a fine fourth place on the day. After some nice teamwork throughout the week, Romain finished fifth in the GC – only six seconds away from the podium.
Speaking after the stage Bardet expressed: “We wanted to make the race hard on today’s final stage and did a good job with that. I tried to make some moves in the final, but it was hard to really shake up things in GC. Overall it was a positive week for us and this was a good sign towards the coming races, even though we didn’t get the result we were coming for.”
