Matthews wins Stage 10 of Tour de France

Michael Matthews of Orica-BikeExchange has joined the select club of riders to have won a stage in all three of cycling’s Grand Tours, picking up his maiden Tour de France stage victory in Revel this afternoon. The Team Sky rider now leads fellow countryman Adam Yates by 16 seconds going into stage 11, a 162.5 kilometre run from Carcacassone to Montpellier.

“It’s unbelievable”, he said. After two really bad years of this race, I was close to giving in.

“I thought maybe this race is not for me but today my dream comes true”.

The 2016 Paris-Nice stage victor executed a fast and precise sprint carrying the desire for his first Tour de France stage victory all the way to the line and first place. Finishes, sprints, stages, interviews, incidents: you will miss nothing. “I’m just happy to have had the green jersey for as long as I have”.

The stage took the riders from Escaldes-Engordany in Andorra on a 197-kilometer trek to Revel in the south of France.

This group led with a margin of six minutes with 55kms left and through Castelnaudary, the gap was at 4.40.

Colombia’s Nairo Quintana and Spain’s Joaquim Rodriguez, who announced on the rest day that he will retire at the end of the season, are 23 and 37 seconds behind Froome respectively.

“I was trying to keep everybody turning”.

But Cavendish argued that the Tour’s points classification rules, with extra points awarded to the first rider in a mid-stage “intermediate” sprint, also played Sagan’s favour.

The Australian won from a strong group that included world champion Peter Sagan of Tinkoff, who finished second, and Edvald Boasson Hagen of Dimension Data, third.

Inside the last 15km, the peloton eased up to allow the breakaway their fun and it became a battle between the front seven.

With the group holding an advantage of almost four minutes in the closing kilometres, the victor was always likely to come from the move, with Sagan, Van Avermaet and Dumoulin all seeking their second stage win of the race.

“It was never the plan to go for a breakaway today”.

“The stage went as it did, I couldn’t win because (Matthews) was too good”. “I have no word to describe what they did for me”.

“We have achieved the number one goal, that was to win a stage”, the team’s sports director Matt White said.