Jack Haig pushed the pace and then George Bennett attacked. It was really hard from the bottom of the climb. I still felt good so I chose my moment to go. They responded the first time but then I tried again and I gave it everything to get away. It's fantastic. I don't know why I'm a bit emotional after today. I gave it everything.
It's a good gap to Tom [Dumoulin] but he could take two minutes out of me in the TT. I've been fighting since Israel to have a good gap, and I have that now but it could vanish in 35km. We'll see.
We managed to get up there, but it was a real battle between [Richard] Carapaz and [Miguel] Lopez for the win. They were just looking at each other and not putting in any work. I think we could have made it, we could have managed to catch up, but we missed out by a long way.
Simon Yates was really good today. I felt that I went better today, but days are like this, ultimately. (Eurosport)
That was a really hard stage and it was made even harder by the cold weather. There was quite a gap between me and [Chris] Froome, which is good but we couldn't hold the maglia rosa. In the end, we couldn't hold his wheel. He was really strong and handled the stage incredibly well. He deserves to be in the lead.
We're on the podium at the moment and we're going to do our best to try and stay there.
The main contenders were ahead and very strong. Mitchelton Scott were doing well and it was a surprise what happened today. We have to recover and turn it around. We have our strategy and that’s cycling. The last week will be hard and Chris is a strong rider. We hope we can turn it around, starting with the TT. We just need to keep going.
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