Neo-pro Frank van den Broek played a huge role in Team DSM-Firmenich-PostNl's surprise rout on stage 1 of the Tour de France, powering team leader Romain Bardet to the stage win and the first maillot jaune of the race in an electrifying finale in Rimini.
The 23-year-old was in the day's early breakaway on one of the toughest opening stages in recent Tour de France history, with seven classified climbs and soaring temperatures in the Grand Départ from Florence, Italy.
Van den Broek dropped back to help Bardet bridge across to the remains of the lead group on the Coté de San Leo, the third to last climb, with 48.7km to go, then the pair dropped Jonas Abrahamson (Uno-X Mobility) and Valentin Madouas (Groupama-FDJ), setting off alone to hold off the furious chase led by Visma-Lease a Bike, EF Education-EasyPost and Lidl-Trek.
Coming into the final stretch, the peloton had the DSM pair in their sights but Van den Broek took one last long pull and then eased up to let Bardet take the stage.
"It's amazing," Van den Broek said to Eurosport after the stage. "I don't have any words for it. We had the plan coming into the first weekend to be there, and I was in the break.
"We were good from the beginning, and then Romain made the jump to the group, and I could help him. That was good - he paced me on the last climb because I was really on my limit. Then I could do some turns on the on the flat run-in, but it was headwind, very hard, and the camera motorbike was next to us. So that made it, made it extra hard.
"The last straight was so, so long, and I could see the peloton, and it was just head down and push the last energy out of my legs."
Not only did Van den Broek take second on the stage, he claimed the points classification and best young rider classification lead, which, along with Bardet's maillot jaune, gives his team three of the four special Tour de France jerseys.
The team's coach Matt Winston credited Van den Broek for the success.
"[Bardet] owes a lot of that victory to Frank. Frank was amazing there in that break, his first Grand Tour, his first day in the Tour de France, straight away in the break, waiting for guys coming up to him because he knew the race would come up to him. He pulled his heart out there to bring Romain on as good into the finish as possible," Winston said.
"We were really nervous in that last 15k - big roads, headwind. We knew it was difficult, but we also said, we're gonna go for it. You never know what's gonna happen. And the more sprinters that we're dropping from the peloton, we thought maybe it's not going to be as controlled behind. It was hot, people were running out of legs quickly. So we said, 'Let's just go all in. Let's really go for it and see what happens'."
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