Pello Bilbao: "We can do beautiful things in this race"

With the eyes on the overall win, Bahrain - Victorious have taken to the opening stage of the Tour of the Alps with an aggressive approach, as Pello Bilbao was on the attack and took second place at the end of the day to position himself in the head of the candidates for the overall victory.

Despite not having taken the race hard at the day's thoughest ascent, the Passo Brocon, Bahrain afterwards took control of the peloton together with INEOS Grenadiers to try and reel in Geoffrey Bouchard, who ended up succeeding in his bid for the stage win out of the break of the day.

“The cooperation in the peloton was not optimal. At one point we thought the race was over. Bouchard had more than two minutes, but in the last fifteen kilometers he struggled all by himself. We got closer," he said in a post-race interview. There was a constant start-stop motion in the peloton which eventually saw it just missing out on the catch by five seconds. Bilbao had attacked on the penultimate lap to spark moves in the peloton, and was then again active in the finale as he sprinted to second place, first in the reduced peloton.

"We tried to go full in the last five kilometers and we came close, within seconds," he added, in what could've been his second win of the season. The main target though, besides priming form for the Giro d'Italia, will be the overall classification, in which the Basque has pointed out that the team is motivated: "We showed that we can do beautiful things in this race."