🚴 Tour de France 2018 | Stage 3 | BMC win Team Time Trial to put Greg Van Avermaet into yellow!

BMC Racing put in a very strong performance on today's team time trial to take the stage victory, and with it move Greg Van Avermaet into the overall race lead. Avermaet sat just 16 seconds down on Bora-Hansgrohe's Peter Sagan, with the world champion & his time unsurprisingly losing 50 seconds to the American outfit.

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How did the action unfold?

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Mitchelton-Scott got today's racing underway and the Australian team set a brilliant benchmark time for the likes of Team Sky, BMC and Team Sunweb all to battle against. They will undoubtedly be very happy that they were able to keep their main GC man, Adam Yates, in touching distance to his main rivals of Froome (& Thomas) and Porte.

Team Sky followed Mitchelton-Scott and took the lead themselves, with a time of 38:50 that would eventually finish 4 seconds adrift of BMC. Chris Froome gained back some time against the likes of the Movistar men, Nibali, Bardet, Uran and others, whilst Geraint Thomas stepped into a very commanding position.

Third up were Movistar and, at times, it looked as if the Spanish outfit were set to lose a huge chunk of time of today's stage, but eventually finished with an okay time that placed them tenth out of the 22 teams. Both Valverde and Landa remain in contention, but the 53 second time deficit means Nario Quintana falls behind to 2 minutes and 8 seconds.

The next contending team to roll out were BMC, and they put in a blisteringly fast time trial with an average speed of 54.9km/h and knocked Team Sky off the top spot by 4 seconds. It also meant that, after Fernando Gaviria (Quick-Step Floors) and Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe) were both dropped by their respective teams during their rides, Greg Van Avermaet would move into the leader's yellow jersey. More importantly for them, Richie Porte gains time on everyone.

EF Education First-Drapac p.b. Canondale followed BMC and, finishing just 35 seconds adrift, have also made sure that Rigoburto Uran is knocking on the podium's door.

Both UAE Team Emirates and AG2R La Mondiale lost significant amounts of time.

Most of the remaining teams finished as expected, but Quick-Step Floors, with the potential to put either Fernando Gaviria or Julian Alaphilippe into yellow (dependent if either rider was the first 4 over the line) put in a great ride and at moments they looked as if they would take the crown at the end of the day. In the end, they finished 7 seconds down.

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Was my prediction correct?

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✅ I predicted a win for BMC today
Predictions Accuracy - 2/3 - 66.6%

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My Prediction;

BMC Racing - BMC are undoubtedly the strongest TT team at the Tour and will be looking to move Richie Porte up the >leaderboard. It'll be close between BMC and Team Sky, but I think the former will edge this one in the end.

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Stage 3 Result;

1 ) BMC Racing 38:46
2 ) Team Sky + 4s
3 ) Quick-Step Floors +7s
4 ) Mitchelton-Scott + 9s
5 ) Team Sunweb + 11s
6 ) EF Education First-Drapac + 35s
7 ) Bora-Hansgrohe + 50s
8 ) Astana Pro Team + 51s
9 ) Katusha-Alpecin + 52s
10 ) Movistar Team + 53s
11 ) Bahrain-Merida + 1:06
12 ) AG2R La Mondiale + 1:15
13 ) Team LottoNl-Jumbo
14 ) Trek-Segafredo + 1:16
15 ) UAE Team Emirates + 1:38
16 ) Groupama-FDJ + 1-42
17 ) Fortuneo-Samsic + 1:46
18 ) Direct Energie + 1:51
19 ) Lotto Soudal
20 ) Dimension Data + 1:52
21 ) Wanty-Groupe Gobert + 2:24
22 ) Cofidis, Solutions Credits + 3:23

GC Classification after Stage 3;

1 ) Greg Van Avermaet (BMC Racing | BEL) 09:08:55
2 ) Tejay van Garderen (BMC Racing | USA)
3 ) Geraint Thomas (Team Sky | GBR) + 0:00:03
4 ) Philippe Gilbert (Quick-Step Floors | BEL) + 0:00:05
5 ) Bob Jungels (Quick-Step Floors | LUX) + 0:00:07
6 ) Julian Alaphilippe (Quick-Step Floors | FRA)
7 ) Tom Dumoulin (Team Sunweb | NED) + 0:00:11
8 ) Søren Kragh Andersen (Team Sunweb | DEN)
9 ) Michael Matthews (Team Sunweb | AUS)
10 ) Rigoberto Uran (EF Education First-Drapac | COL) + 0:00:34

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