"I was confident before the stage" - Mathias Vacek hangs on to Valenciana leader's jersey despite fireworks during the queen stage

Two stages into this year's Volta a Comunitat Valenciana and we still have a rather surprising overall leader with Lidl-Trek's Mathias Vacek. Thanks to a spectacular team performance in the opening team time trial, the Czech rider had so comfortable position coming into today's queen stage that not even some of the best climbers in the world were able to steal the orange jersey from him.

"We knew that I had to go deep today, really deep actually, to maintain the jersey or, at least, try to keep the gap as small as possible and in the end, I managed to do that by just a handful of seconds. That was the goal for the day and the Team did a really great job to keep me in position and pulling all day. I am so happy that we can keep the jersey in the Team and we still have a lot of motivation for the race days. It's a really nice feeling to see them do that for me," he said in a post-race reaction.

Vacek, despite being a tremendous all-rounder, knew he can't quite match the likes of Bilbao, Almeida or Buitrago when the climb gets really steep, but he didn't panic and confidently maintained his own pace. "I was confident before the stage, I knew I could do a good effort although the climb was really steep. I tried to keep to my pace and not follow the attacks too much in the last kilometers because that is what would have put me into difficulty."

While this battle comes out as a victory for Vacek, the war is not over just yet, because tomorrow's stage will put the 22-year-old Czech through another hard test with the decisive climb El Remedio (7.9km a 6.5%) located a bit more than 20 kilometers from the line. And after the climb, the racing doesn't get any easier with up and down parcours until the line.

"Of course, the goal is to keep the jersey for as long as possible and keep up the incredible teamwork. I was really happy to have a gap like we did after yesterday's team time trial as it really helped us. We will do our best over the next stages and try to help each other as a team. Until now, the atmosphere amongst us is great, the Team is doing super good so I am confident for the next stages."

"It's nice to see that all the work I have done is paying off and it is showing at races. I don't want to be too over confident for the season but if everything goes as planned, and I get a bit of luck, then some nice results will keep coming," he concludes optimistically. Vacek showed himself strongly at cobbled classics last spring as well as in time trials and we're yet to see what his true limits are.