Columbia wraps up with stage and overall wins

The Columbia-HTC team added to its tally of victories in the Tour of Austria on Sunday, delivering Andre Greipel to the sprint victory and safely ushering Michael Albasini to the overall win in Vienna. Greipel secured the win in the sprint classification thanks to his third stage victory.

"I'm very proud of this win because it's the first stage race victory for Columbia-HTC this season, and it was a real team effort, too" Albasini said. "We only had six riders for a lot of the race, and that made it difficult to control at times, but we managed to do it. I'm very grateful to my teammates for all the hard work they did. Over the last two years I've worked hard to improve my climbing and that has helped me win here. It's very encouraging."

Coming into the penultimate stage, Albasini had just 11 seconds on Italian Giampaolo Caruso, but put in a strong performance to extend his lead in the overall. "Time trialling remains my biggest weak point, but I managed to get through the race's time trial and then after that I could begin to think about celebrating overall," said Albasini.

The day's action saw a break of five go clear and gain two minutes. Markus Eibegger (Elk Haus NÖ), Koos Moerenhout (Rabobank), Ian Stannard (ISD-Neri), Martin Riska (RC ARBÖ Gourmetfein Wels) and Arthur Gajek (Milram) put pressure on the Columbia-HTC team, but with some help from Austrian team Voralberg-Corratec, the leaders were caught just in time for Greiel to claim his 13th win of the year.

"We only got back the last break of the day with a kilometre to go and there were some tram lines 200 metres from the finish, but I felt really good and sure of my chances. It wasn't too hard a win. We'd done ten laps of the finishing circuit so I knew what I had to face, and I had a good lead-out as usual. My team did a great job. Now I'll go on to the Tour of Saxony in Germany and try and get some more wins there."