Fabian Cancellara: "29 days in yellow mean a lot"

Coming to Utrecht I said this could be my last Tour de France and I didn't want to go home empty handed. Next year it'll start at the Mont-Saint-Michel with no time trial again so my big occasion was yesterday and I was very disappointed to miss out on the win and the yellow jersey. This morning I woke up early. I didn't have the best sleep. I looked at the nice weather and believed it would be an easy stage but as we started racing, everything changed. It became chaos like in a one-day race with a lot of wind and rain. At the team meeting, it was mostly about the weather conditions. I found myself in an unexpected situation. We went through a small town with roundabouts, the bunch split into pieces and I realized I was at the front with Tony [Martin] and Tom Dumoulin. I wanted to save energy for the sprint but I didn't have much left with 25km to go. I had to push a lot. I looked at the wheels of the three sprinters and I gave everything. Maybe with ten more meters of racing, I would have won, but I'm just happy that I got the yellow jersey.
29 days in yellow mean a lot and eleven years after the first one is special. I was a little boy in Liège in 2004 and I had an amazing day. I'm kind of a veteran now. From those fifteen years as a pro, I have a lot of achievements and memories. I've gone through hard times too. After my crash in March this year, I've had one month off the bike so for the first time I enjoyed being at home with my family. Just moving was hurting. It wasn't like in 2012 when I came back pretty quickly after the operation. This time I was happy with my return to racing at the Tour des Fjords but I got sick before the Tour de Suisse and I suffered a lot. I didn't have good signals until last week-end. Now I've closed a chapter of bad luck.
With regards to tomorrow, the bad thing is that I've never done the Mur de Huy. But I don't look at this race like a Flèche wallone, I look at it like a Tour de France stage. I know what I'll have to do. It's pretty similar as today: ride at the front and avoid the chaos. I have in mind to not lose too much time tomorrow and make it up on the cobblestones. It'll be a new chapter of my career and I don't want to think further than this Tour de France. I'm totally focused on this race.