Lotto Belisol hasn’t reached a place in top 10 at the World Championship team time trial as was hoped. The team ended up on the 13th place. For the second year in a row Omega Pharma – QuickStep was the winner. At about three o’clock Lotto Belisol began the 56,8 kilometers long time trial from Montecatini Terme to Florence under a blue sky. Lars Bak, André Greipel, Adam Hansen and Greg Henderson crossed the finish line together. Bart De Clercq had to let go after 35 kilometers, Jürgen Roelandts did so too in the final 15 kilometers.
After the finish the team could take place in the hot seats until Garmin improved the time with almost one minute. At the end of the afternoon the team was 13th in the classification on a total of 35 participants at 3’01” of the number one. For the victory it was a really close call between the Belgian squad Omega Pharma – QuickStep and the Australian Orica – GreenEdge. At the end OPQS won with a tiny difference of 81 hundreds of a second. Team Sky could go on the podium as third.
Herman Frison, sports director: “We were convinced we had selected a homogeneous team for the World Championship. The guys started very well. At the first intermediate point, just after the only climb on the course, we had the eighth place in the end. That was very good. Afterwards Jürgen Roelandts started to have some problems, he couldn’t give everything. After 35 km suddenly it was over for Bart De Clercq, before he had ridden very well. Of course he had to quit the Vuelta because of an injury, that’s possibly an explanation. Then five were left, but Roelandts would be dropped as well. He might have missed some power due to his return from Canada. The other four still went full ahead. Great job of them, they rode a really strong race. But slowly we lost places.”
“It was a beautiful course with new roads and few turns, that definitely wasn’t a problem. A very nice course for a team time trial. We had said to cross the climb all together and we set a good time there. Because of different circumstances De Clercq and Roelandts didn’t perform as well as expected. When you are left with four that early it’s difficult to reach the top ten goal.”