Alberto Contador hasn’t been at his best in the Tour de France so far, losing 1:45 minutes to yellow jersey Chris Froome (Team Sky) on Ax-3 Domaines and another 2:03 in the time trial to Mont-Saint-Michel. But today he took the opportunity to make up some of his deficit when his Saxo-Tinkoff team went to the front of an already decimated peloton 25 km from the finish and split the group.

6 Saxo-Tinkoff riders pulled away with 8 others, including GC contenders Bauke Mollema, Laurens ten Dam (both Belkin Pro Cycling) and Jakob Fuglsang (Astana) as well as sprinters Mark Cavendish and Peter Sagan. Riding hard for the rest of the stage, Contador and his team managed to pull out an advantage of 1:09 minutes over the next group with Froome.

“I'm very happy with today's stage. Had someone told me before the start that we were going to get 1:09 on the leader, I wouldn’t have believed it. My team was extraordinary. At first we remained calm when Alejandro Valverde had a mishap; we decided not to work together with the other teams. But in the end we saw that everyone was at the limit, while our team still was very strong; so we decided to try it.”

During most of the stage, Contador was only concerned to stay out of the wind, he said: “The team protected me from the wind during the entire stage. It was too dangerous to try something ourselves in the crosswind until we saw that the most important teams were weakened. Then we decided to go forward as our team is very powerful. Bennati did a one-kilometre turn riding like a motorbike, and the group broke into a thousand pieces.”

In the final minutes of the stage, Contador was often seen animating his teammates and the other riders in the group to keep going and increase the gap as much as possible. Afterwards he admitted that he didn’t think they could do so much damage: “For some time we were only at 10 seconds, but I have to say ‘chapeau’ to all my teammates. They have demonstrated the team spirit Bjarne Riis has instilled in all of us. We have shown that we all have the same goal in mind, and it has been a great day for Saxo-Tinkoff.”

With this display of teamwork, Contador has shown that the Tour is not yet over. But he will still have to ride aggressively in the Alps: “It doesn’t make much of a difference whether I’m at 3:57 or at 2:45 overall. I must attack in the Alps anyway, but we have taken back some of the time I lost in the time trial. The Tour is not yet finished, a thousand things can happen. For now we have to rest, tomorrow is another day.”