"I don't really have an explanation for what happened when I fell in the finale. But my hands were really wet and I lost my grip on the handlebars. In any case, I'm not in any pain, I just have a graze on my right knee, but it won't affect me going forward. We'll need to be ready for tomorrow, as it will be the first big test in the battle we're going to face over the next three days.

At first, I didn't realise that Benjamin Thomas was only 1'50" behind in the overall standings, so Lidl-Trek asked us to join the chase. We went for it because it was a good idea, and...

"A small breakaway got away. We quickly realised that the sprinter teams wanted to control the race, the gap went down to around 50 seconds… I caught them by surprise to counter-attack and I got back to the front with Thibault Guernalec. We then tried to manage the situation on some tough roads. We tried to hold off the peloton on the climbs and make up time on the descents... We came a little short with the headwind in the final kilometres. I think that prevented us from going all the way. There were three or four teams riding, we had a good day and we'll try again.

I'm...

"I’m really happy with my performance today, especially after spending so much energy yesterday in the breakaway. During the recon and also the warm up, I felt it in my legs but I was motivated to give it my all in this TT. I didn’t think about the overall lead at all. I knew that guys like Remco [Evenepoel] and the other GC favourites would gain a lot of time today so the yellow jersey was not in sight. It was just for myself, I wanted to do a good TT. I asked [Evenepoel] a few weeks ago if he thought I could finish within a minute from him. It was close...

"This morning we thought the breakaway would have a chance, and that's what happened despite having Florian Lipowitz in our group. I took a gamble on this stage, but it was difficult to win. There were a lot of us in the finale and each time it was up to me to react to the acceleration, but that's normal after all. So I responded to the attacks several times, but it wasn't enough.

To succeed in this kind of scenario, I'd have had to have extraordinary legs. But with everything I'd given up just to stay in the breakaway, that wasn't the case any more.

All in...

"At the start of the stage, I was in a slightly more attacking state of mind, but in the end I found myself alone at the front. That allowed me to pick up the points for the first four climbs, so it was the right strategy. It's true that being alone made it feel a bit long but after all it was nice, the weather was good. And then after that I was in the company of three other riders, which was quite nice. Even though I quickly realised that I couldn't go much further and that I wouldn't be taking the points on the cat-2 climb.

Now I can say that I'm getting the hang...