“When echelons form it's similar to falling through ice: you know you've got, like five seconds to rectify and get in the right position to save yourself or it's finished – it's over. The group went, [Michal] Kwiatkowski just missed it, he left a little gap and I actually did more watts in the sprint over to the front group than I did at the finish sprint. I just managed to get on as the last man and we were away. It was close but it was nice to do it.
“I just had to stay on [Peter] Sagan in the final. We had three of us there and he had two so we could afford to attack in the final and it would mean that his lead-out guy would have to chase. Niki attacked in the last kilometre and it was Bodnar with Sagan and he had to chase the move down and that meant that if I just stayed on Sagan, then he'd have to hit out in the headwind finish so he was left on the front a bit too early. He knew I was going to come around him. He was happy to save his legs for another day.
“It was me on the podium but it should have been all of Omega Pharma-Quickstep today. They were all just incredible. They rode from kilometre 60 and they rode their hearts out. They rode into the ground.
“It was a difficult stage. It was a nervous stage but finally... I'm so excited to win, so happy to win. It's been a difficult few days and it's nice to be on the podium again. It wasn't really a master plan. We just felt the wind was in the right position so we started to ride a bit harder. We did it more to kind of make the peloton tired and finally it broke and we were racing.
“The finish would have suited me if it was a bunch sprint but we actually happy to have a smaller group and it ended up being a two-up sprint between Sagan and myself and I was happy to beat him.
“They guys gave it everything. Yesterday they gave everything and I let them down in the final; today they put even more into it, even earlier and I'm so happy we could win. It's really nice.”
