Nicolas Roche (Team Sky) has expressed his disappointment on Twitter about the outcome of yesterday’s Team Time Trial in the Tour de France. Team Sky managed to come within a second of the winning BMC Racing Team’s time.
After his team mate Wout Poels put in a big turn on the final climb, Roche was seen to be struggling. On the run-in to the finish, the team were down to the bare minimum of five riders, so needed to ensure that Roche was still with them. Despite having led at the second time check, Team Sky just missed out on the win.
Afterwards, Roche tweeted: “No words to express how I feel now. Loosing the stage for 0.6 sec is hard! gave it all, but wasn’t enough. Sorry guys @TeamSky.”
He also went on to say: “sorry because it was a dream for me and the guys to win a tour de france stage! Always wanted to one day win a ttt in the tour. So close.”
However, despite Roche’s disappointment with the result, the team are going into the first rest day in a very strong position, with Chris Froome looking very strong so far, and well capable of regaining the Tour de France crown he won in 2013.
Following on from the stage, Chris Froome expressed support for the disappointed Irishman as he said, “At the end everyone has seen that Nicolas Roche was struggling a bit but this is the nature of team time trial. He has given so much before. We can’t put it down to him struggling on the last climb. That’s just a team effort and today BMC were better than us.”
At least the dubs won