Tom Dumoulin (Giant-Alpecin) admitted to strongly mixed feelings on Monday as he remained Vuelta leader for another day but his team’s hard work culminated in a narrow defeat for their sprinter John Degenkolb.
Dumoulin also recognised that he did not think that he could win the Vuelta, but the Dutchman is notably more upbeat about his chances overall than as recently as last Tuesday, when he told Cyclingnews he was not interested in the overall classification.
“I’m both happy that I’m still leader but disappointed for John,” Dumoulin told reporters. “The plan was to go for the win with John, unfortunately he got second. That’s a shame but that’s cycling. We needed all the guys to chase down the breakaways, so there was nobody left for the leadout.
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“At least we got the sprint we had looked for, and we can be very proud of how the team rode and worked today. But it didn’t work out for the win.”
Dumoulin himself was notably active in that work in the latter part of the stage, chasing down one attack by a Lotto-Soudal rider and driving on the descent at the head of the 40-strong lead peloton as they chased down a three-rider break. Apart from urging other riders to collaborate in that pursuit with waves of his hand as he pulled off the head of the line, Dumoulin also stood out of the saddle to gesture at a TV motorbike to move ahead. [The motorbike had come so close to a lone break at one point the rider might have used its slipstream, risking the chances for a bunch sprint that Dumoulin and Giant-Alpecin wanted so badly.]
Discussing the huge early move on stage 10 with some 40 riders up the road, Dumoulin said, “We anticipated a long fight for the break, because there are not so many sprinters' teams here - or at least not so many sprinters’ teams who still have a sprinter here.”
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