Philip Roodhooft, manager de l'équipe Alpecin-Deceuninck de Jasper Philipsen et Mathieu van der Poel, à l'arrivée de la 16e étape de ce Tour de France 2024 à Nîmes.
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00:00Yes, but of course it's not a big surprise, it has been nervous, it's always the case
00:08when it's flat and everybody expects a sprint, and what we see this year is that there's
00:12very little interest of other teams to have an early flight and to have an early break
00:20and create some publicity, so everybody knows it's just waiting for the final where all
00:25of a sudden speed goes up and it goes extremely fast, and I think that we have the benefit
00:32of the quality of the riders we have, but also riders who have been together for quite
00:37a few times, there's many automatisms and that helps us to stay calm and to come with
00:44perfect timing, and then quality of the sprinter, quality of the lead out, I think it was textbook
00:52today, and that's something next to the victory, it's something to be proud of.
00:59So William, Girmay, Godown, Jasper is now much closer in the Green Jersey classification,
01:06it must delight you.
01:10Yeah, delight is I think the wrong word in a sentence, with the crash of somebody, so
01:17we are sorry about the crash, but in the end we can't change it, we didn't cause anything,
01:23so it just happened, and yes it does bring Jasper closer to Green, like his crash in
01:29the first week took him very far away from Green, and even before the crash we didn't
01:36give up on Green, Jasper was also in the intermediate sprint, and it's very clear that now that
01:44he has gotten closer, there's no reason not to believe in it anymore, but we will see
01:49what happens, we can only as a team try to help him getting as much points as possible,
01:55and then we still depend on what happens with Girmay and how he performs in the next five
02:01days.
02:02So now he's going point hunting on the tougher stages as well.
02:06Yeah, he was already point hunting, and it's quite easy, there's no sprint stage coming
02:12up anymore, so there's only one goal left, and that makes it easy for both of them, and
02:18maybe it adds something, it adds some flavour to the stages to come, where you would not
02:23expect riders like that to be in a battle, that we now see something happening that we
02:30would have not expected.
02:31Thank you, and congratulations.
02:32You're welcome, and thanks.
02:33Does it take the pressure off in a funny way, coming from behind as a team, chasing Green
02:39jersey, as opposed to holding it?
02:41Yes, but it's not that we're happy with it, I mean, the way Jasper got so far away from
02:47it, with the crash, with the stage where he was disqualified, I see what you mean, of
02:55course there's no pressure of holding it, but basically it's always nicer to have the
02:59pressure of having to keep it, because that means you have it, and you just need to keep
03:04it.
03:05I think it will still depend on the performance of another rider, of another team, if we will
03:10get there, and that's a pity, but we didn't give up on it at any point, and we knew winning
03:17stages it would come closer again, today it's unexpected, the difference there is, but it's
03:24only extra motivation to keep chasing it.