Trek Factory Racing stunned cycling fans, and even themselves, with a nail-biting victory during the opening team time trial at the Tour of Alberta in Grande Praire on Wednesday. Their hard-fought win, which was by a narrow margin of 0.74 of a second over favourites Orica-GreenEdge, put Bauke Mollema in a much-deserved first leader's jersey.
"This is a great start of the week and it is always nice to be in the leader's jersey," said Mollema, who has never won a team time trial before. "Today was a team effort. We did it with eight guys and that makes it even nicer to win. We are all really happy."
Trek Factory Racing went into the team time trial in somewhat of an under-dog position with much of the media predicting strong performances from Orica-GreenEdge, Giant-Alpecin and Katusha. Even Mollema felt, prior to the start, that winning the stage would be a stretch.
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"We have a strong team and we new that we would fight for the first three positions, but actually, I didn't expect to beat them [Orica-GreenEdge] because they brought almost their entire team for the World Championships.
"They have a really strong team and they have won team time trials before, so I was really happy that we beat them. It was really close but our team rode really well, our guys were really strong."
Mollema led Trek Factory Racing over the finish line with four teammates; Matthew Busche, Marco Coledan, Hayden Roulston and Jesse Sergent, while Kristof Vandewalle, Laurent Didier and Gregory Rast made their contributions during the early sections of the parcour.
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