Our American climber sprinted into the lead of the King of the Mountains competition on stage one and fulfilled a boyhood dream when he pulled on the polka dot jersey. He fell in love with Tour’s climbers' shirt and has since worn it every stage but one.

As the Tour has travelled from the Basque Country over the Pyrénées to Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Bordeaux, crossing into Dordogne and Limousin, Neilson has collected KOM points on the summits of huge cols and calf-biting hills. He now leads the climber’s competition by eight points before tomorrow’s showdown on the Puy-de-Dôme.

The mythical climb returns to the Tour de France tomorrow for the first time in 35 years. An extinct volcano, which rises high above the Massif Central, Puy-de-Dôme has hosted some of the greatest races in the history of our sport. Enormous crowds will brave the hot summer sun to witness the next.

Neilson and his teammates want to play a role. They will try to beat the odds and lead over the finish line at the summit.

Read their thoughts after today’s stage, before tomorrow’s test.

It feels pretty awesome to wear polka dots. There are a few points left out on the road that I wish I could have got, because I know it’s a hard fight to keep polka dots. It is going to be an interesting fight in the weeks to come.

The only strategy is the breakaway. If I am not in the breakaway, I am not getting any points, so get in the breakaway and hopefully I am up there with a few strong teammates and we’ll go for the stage win as well.

All I really know about Puy-de-Dôme is what I have seen from the profile. It just looks like a beast. You’re going to need a lot in the tank to win on top, because the last four and a half k is over 11%. I can’t remember the last time I did a finish that hard. It’s going to be sweet.

Today was hot and fast. I would say short and sweet, but it wasn’t really short. It was long. It wasn’t really sweet, so that would be a lie. The finale got a bit hairy. There were a few fast moves pulled. I saw a couple of guys go down. Cav has gone home. It wasn’t a nice day.

Today was fast. With 48 km/hr, it wasn’t easy. It was hot. We arrived at the end with Alberto and we tried with him. It was really fast for 55 kilometers. The last hour was horrible. It was one hour fighting, up and down through cities. Woah. This is the Tour de France, man. The Tour de France!

Our Tour so far was obviously painted by Richard crashing on day one and it has been a process of re-finding a different way of going about things as a result of that. Although I don’t think the objectives are any different than they were at the beginning of the race, our ability to execute on them is somewhat diminished.

Before the race, we wanted to win King of the Mountains and we wanted to go for stage wins. We never really focused on a GC race. A lot of people thought that, but losing Richard was not losing a GC contender; it was losing our best shoot of winning the KOM jersey or winning a stage. We have had to be creative in the way we are going about chasing both of those items.

How do I think it is going? I think it is going as good as I think it could be considering that Richard isn’t in the race. And I think that our guys have executed on our objectives going into the race as well as they possibly could have considering Richard is not in the race, but the truth of our Tour de France is going to be in the second week. That is when we are going to have the most opportunities to chase after stages and where it is going to become very apparent whether the King of the Mountains battle is real or not, so, so far, so good, other than—huge asterisk—losing Richard, so far, so good, happy with the way everyone has been going. But the measuring stick for us is going to be when we get into these real breakaway stages and how well we execute in those days when we do have a real possibility to win.

Puy-de-Dôme, when you look at it historically, about 50% of the time, it is a breakaway that makes it to the bottom. A couple of the people from the breakaway have managed to make it to the top to contest the stage. About 50% of the time it is a pure GC race, or the people in the breakaway get caught with like two kilometers to go. We don’t have any chance of winning if we try to do a straight drag race up the mountain, so our best chance to win tomorrow is to put people in the breakway.

The big question is how much energy are we willing to spend? How many matches are we willing to burn to do that? You could say, oh, it is the day before the rest day, but nonetheless that fatigue builds up, so the question for the directors is going to be: how much are we going to burn for a 50/50 chance? When there are stages that are almost 100% sure that the breakaway is going to go to the end that day. Puy-de-Dôme is not that, so how much energy do you burn in the context of three weeks to try to go in with an at best 50% chance of the breakaway even making it, and then once you are in breakaway, there are by the way ten, 12, 15 other guys that also might beat you up the hill, so there is even less of a chance of the 50% chance that you make it, so those are pretty low odds to burn a lot of matches, but they are much better odds than we have of winning a sprint stage, so in some form or other we have to try. One of the first director sportifs I ever hired, Jonny Weltz won on Puy-de-Dôme, so it has been done before by a former member of this team, so we need to live up to the legend of Jonny.