Tao Geoghegan Hart after Tour of the Alps win: "There are still difficult stages to come, but this is a good start"

Tao Geoghegan Hart has been delivering a strong season, showing the form he had at the 2020 Giro d'Italia for the first time in quite a while, and is taking advantage of it. He's taken his second win of the season today at the Tour of the Alps and has put on the leader's jersey.

“We made it a nice race and stayed calm in the final. Jack Haig was pretty strong, but I had a lot of confidence in a good outcome after his attack. We had reconnoitered the final yesterday and that helped," the Briton said in a post-race interview. INEOS took up a lot of the responsibility of the day both chasing the breakaway and setting up the pace up the final climbs, and benefited from it later.

The team was forced to chase an early attack from Jack Haig which threatened to take the stage win. Hart looked strong and had the support of Pavel Sivakov in the decisive kilometers of the stage. He saved his legs for one final acceleration and that came about in the final 500 meters, where he caught Hugh Carthy and dropped the entire remaining competition into the stage victory.

"It was logical that the classification riders mixed today, since there are few climbs with these gradients. It was therefore no surprise to me that a small group remained. There are still difficult stages to come, but this is a good start. The roads are very nice in this area, so I enjoyed it," he concluded. Hart sets off for stage two with six seconds over closest competitor Felix Gall.