Tour de France: 'I take my hat off to my teammates,' says Contador

There were plenty of handshakes and hugs at the Tinkoff-Saxo bus after team leader Alberto Contador managed to gain a significant amount of time on several of his rivals in an incident-packed stage to Zelande. After a sluggish performance in the stage 1 time trial, Contador rebounded with a tactically astute performance that saw him gain 1:28 on Nairo Quintana, Vincenzo Nibali and Thibaut Pinot.

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Peter Cossins has written about professional cycling since 1993 and is a contributing editor to Procycling. He is the author of The Monuments: The Grit and the Glory of Cycling's Greatest One-Day Races (Bloomsbury, March 2014) and has translated Christophe Bassons' autobiography, A Clean Break (Bloomsbury, July 2014). 

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