"The race wasn't quite as difficult as we would have liked" - Bernhard Eisel on Ben Zwiehoff's 14th place

Saturday, 20 January 2024 at 15:30

Ben Zwiehoff from the BORA - hansgrohe team was unable to finish higher than 14th place on the fifth stage of the Tour Down Under in Australia. In contrast to the previous successes of the sprint team around hat-trick winner Sam Welsford, BORA couldn't record another success.

"It wasn't what we had hoped for, the race wasn't quite as hard as we would have liked," Bernhard Eisel, SD at BORA - hansgrohe, told RSN after the race. "Unfortunately, only a few teams had ambitions to make the race really hard and so it came down to the final sprint at Willunga. And that doesn't necessarily play into the hands of Zwiehoff and Adria, both fought, but unfortunately came up a little short."

Read also

VIDEO: Oscar Onley's brutal attack that left Julian Alaphilippe and Simon Yates in the dust at Tour Down Under

As Ben Zwiehoff is now 37 seconds behind the overall leader Stephen Williams of Israel - Premier Tech in the overall classification, he and his Spanish team-mate Roger Adrià still have opportunities on tomorrow's final day of the Tour Down Under, even if Eisel is expecting a similarly compact stage.

"The top five can still win the race and up to tenth place is still possible. If we get the chance to move forward, we want to reshape the race with Ben and Roger and maybe turn it around," explained Eisel. "The team is working perfectly, which we also showed on stages 1, 3 and 4, stage 2 was also good with Danny van Poppel in eighth place, and the Bora train with Patrick Gamper, Filip Maciejuk, Ryan Mullen, van Poppel and Welsford outshone everything. We're very happy, we've won half of the stages here, so things are going well."