With a hard wind blowing across the plains of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, we knew our best chance was to break the peloton and get ahead of the sprinters. The final third of the 165.3-km journey from Agen to Pau ventured into the Pyrenean foothills and would suit our attackers if they could crack the teams that wanted to bring the race back together for a bunch kick.

Neilson Powless, Rui Costa, and Marijn van den Berg tried first, forcing away a 22-man move of hitters on the first cross-wind sector. With the peloton lined out behind them, they powered away and looked to be gone, until the GC teams took up the chase because one of the riders in Neilson, Rui, and Marijn’s group was only a handful of minutes down on the classification.

Still, it took the peloton until the 70-kilometer-to-go mark to catch them. The peloton soon split again. This time we had Alberto Bettiol and Stefan Bissegger in the front group. The rest of the team soon joined them from behind. And then, with 40 kilometers to go, Richard Carapaz went on the attack on the first of two category-four climbs. Knowing that the sprinters’ teams were knackered after almost three hours of all-out effort, the Olympic champ wanted to try his luck and see if he could get a gap big enough to hold all the way to Pau. Drilling it up the climbs with Tobias Halland Johannessen from UnoX on his wheel, he managed to push his advantage out to nearly 40 seconds. It hovered there until 20 kilometers to go when he realized that there was no way he was going to be able to make it stick and sat up to save his legs for the mountains.

Ben Healy, Sean Quinn, and Stefan Bissegger then took over. As the sprinters’ teams pushed forward, our guys set up Stefan to go for a flier. Unfortunately, he got caught behind a crash in the final kilometer.

Tomorrow, we’ll go for it again. It’s time to head into the mountains. Stage 14 takes us from Pau over the Tourmalet to a summit finish on Pla d’Adet.

It was a very crazy day at the Tour de France. Every day, I feel a lot better. I was very responsive with the moves in the end and had good legs. That is what will make the difference now. Tomorrow is a very big day, and I hope to be there. Day to day, I’ve been gaining condition. Now, I’m in a good spot and I hope to be in the fight tomorrow. It’s a super nice stage, one I know well, so I hope to be in the fight for it.

We knew before the start that it was going to be a fast stage. That’s what happened.

We were in there with the people we wanted to be in there with. They did a brilliant race. We were always in the game. In the end, we had some bad luck when Stefan got caught behind a crash with 700 or 800 meters to go.

For us, it is not about being aggressive. Our racing is actually very structured based on the skills of every single rider. We have a great group of riders here. They are all more or less in absolute top condition. We are not going to give up. We will keep the rhythm we have right now for the next upcoming stages.