2015 5TH

“MY HEAD TOLD ME THAT IT COULD ALL CHANGE IN THE TOUR”

You can’t separate everything that happened to me in the Giro from what happened afterwards in the Tour. Even before the Giro I’d had a pretty tough time because I started training at altitude when I was injured from a fall in the Volta a Catalunya. That combined with the injuries I suffered in the Giro. On top of that, my team in the Giro wasn’t as good as I’d have liked and I found myself isolated a long way from the finish too often. I had to put in some very big efforts to try and hold the race together. The Mortirolo was perhaps the day I’ve had to dig the deepest of my entire career, to the point where after the finish on the way to the hotel, I found myself sitting in the team car, throwing up into a newspaper because I had made such a huge physical effort. I’ve still got a photo somewhere of the graph showing the watts I managed to put out in order to save my Giro lead that day. My head told me it could all change in the Tour, but doing the Giro really did for me.