Andy Schleck – “The game can begin now.”

"This morning I counted on losing a couple of seconds to Alberto today because I really don’t like this climb. It’s on my black list. It’s really short and you cannot really find a rhythm so my plan was to just stay on his wheel but he never came past me. I tried to play it a little bit cool at the bottom but he just stayed behind me. Then he attacked at just the right moment and I was not able to follow.
“I just kept calm and I told myself, ‘Right, on the steep part I’ll hold my rhythm’… then at the top I wanted to speed up. And at the end he only gained 10 seconds, and that’s like what I took out of him at Morzine-Avoriaz.
“There’s no real lesson from today’s stage. I could not have done anything differently. The team did a really great job today. The race went really fast right from the start this morning and, after a while, there was a group out there with riders who were quite close in the classification but I said to the team, ‘Right, we ride and we keep them at a certain limit, but the riders who are out there are ones who I’ll gain time on in the Pyrenees… so even if I lost the yellow jersey, it’s okay’. If one of them took the lead, I would not really have cared because I am still only aiming to have the yellow jersey in Paris.”