Impressive 3rd place for Meintjes, who moves up to final 8th GC place

Louis Meintjes completed an impressive stage taking the 3rd place and moving up to 8th final general classification. Victory for Jakob Fuglsang (Astana) who took stage and leader jersey overtaking Richie Porte (BMC) and Daniel Martin (Quick-Step) in GC.

Meintjes (photo Bettini) was really strong towards the last 11.3 km that brought the riders to Plateau de Soalison where, while he was part of the strongest GC riders group, moves away with 3 km to go, dropping all the companions and chasing the leading duo Fuglsang and Martin ahead. His final attack did not give him the stage victory, however it produced a GC moves up, allowing Meintjes to overtake Alberto Contador (Trek-Segafredo), Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) and Andrew Talansky (Cannondale).

“Maybe I could attack a bit earlier but you never know. Sometimes you try earlier and after you pay for it as happened in the first mountain stage in this Dauphiné, during the Mont du Chat, where I attacked and I suffered in the final part loosing time” Louis Meintjes said “With the Tour de France as prospect, these performances make me more confident, and it means that the preparation we are doing with the team is working and we are on the right way”.

Sports director Scirea too is happy: “I’m satisfied for the performance of the whole team. It would have been great to obtain something even better, however it would have been very difficult because the race speed was very very high. Froome had a strong desire to win the Dauphiné and he and his team worked in order to race at a high pace since the start of the stage: that would have made too risky any early attack.
With the prospect of the Tour de France, we had good feedbacks about the high level of the team, all of our riders realized performances at their best during the Dauphiné and they’ll be at the start of the Grand Boucle in an even better form.
Maybe we were not at the top in the early stages, the reason is that our riders have not been in races for a quite long period, so they needed some days to be accustomed to the race pace.
Yesterday performance too confirmed that the average performances level of our team is very good, since we won the team classification on the Alpe d’Huez”.

Stage result.
1. Fuglsang Jakob (Astana Pro Team) 3h26’30”
2. Martin Daniel (Quick-Step Floors) 12″
3. Meintjes Louis (UAE Team Emirates) 27″

Final General Classification
1. Fuglsang Jakob (Astana Pro Team) 29h05’54”
2. Portie Richie (BMC) 10″
3. Martin Daniel (Quick-Step Floors) 1’32”
8. Meintjes Louis (UAE Team Emirates) 3’12”