By Brecht Decaluwé, Jean-François Quénet & Hedwig Kröner in L'Alpe d'Huez
Damiano Cunego (Lampre-Fondital, 2nd)
"I would have liked to win, but when you have a guy that's this explosive in front of you, you just can't do anything about it. I don't regret anything, and I'm happy with the way that my form is coming up. I still want to win a stage here.
"Yesterday, I said that L'Alpe d'Huez was just a climb like the other ones. I also thought the same while I was climbing. But at the top, the emotion is different than anywhere else. My second place means a lot for the future. I'll come back for winning that stage one day. I can improve a lot."
Andreas Klöden (T-Mobile, 5th at 1'10)
"It was very hard; I tried to take the initiative with our team. It went alright. Floyd was also really strong; but nobody took over the lead work, unfortunately. I had to lead almost everything myself. You saw the result.
"At the foot of the climb, Matthias Kessler rode a great tempo. I saw that some guys had problems, so I told him to go flat out. Then, I passed him and the group had shrunk."
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Michael Rogers (T-Mobile, 15th at 2'49)
"It was tough on the last climb but I came out alright so I'm quite happy. It was a hard day, and there's more hard days to come."
Cyril Dessel (AG2R-Prevoyance, 19th at 3'04)
"I gave it my all. I had very good legs on the Col de Lautaret. I put myself in a good position at the bottom of L'Alpe d'Huez but my chain went off. I had to stop. I lost 20 to 30 seconds and I had to overtake 70 riders on the climb.
"My team-mate Mikel did an enormous job dragging me up there. It was such a violent effort; when we caught the yellow jersey group, [Oscar Pereiro's team-mate] David Arroyo accelerated because [Floyd] Landis' group was just ahead. I just missed a little something for staying on the wheels. But I believe I can be happy with the way I climbed. It confirms what I did last week."
Christian Vandevelde (Team CSC, 42nd at 5'16)
"The stage went great - I didn't really have much to do except to keep Carlos out of the wind as much as possible. And try to get him to the bottom of the climb in front. Then, I just had to hang on and do as much as I could for the team classification at the end.
"I did what I could, and Carlos is a smart rider, he knows himself very well. He didn't go at the first acceleration, he kinda waited and went back to them a little bit later."
