I was pretty excited and happy to be selected to race the Giro for the first time. The Cervelo TestTeam put a strong lineup together with the main focus being to support Carlos Sastre in his bid to the general classification.  My role in the team was primarily to support Carlos as much as possible in the Mountains while also covering breakaways and trying to win a stage.

We stayed pretty quite in the first week of the race, not doing much other than keeping Carlos in a good position at the front of the bunch and conserving our energy as much as possible ready for the decisive stages that would come in the middle and later parts of the Giro. There were some really long stages in the first 10 days of the race, in one three day block we covered close to 700km!!

Simon had his first Giro d’Italia stage win today at the top of the San Luca climb in Bologna. Gerrans and his teammate Philip Deignan were part of a breakaway that took off from the peloton only 12km into the stage, and in the final kilometer, Gerrans rode away from the remaining survivors of the break for an uncontested victory.

For more news on stage 14 please see www.cervelo.com.

I was kind of surprise that my best result for the Spring Classics was at Liege. Being the hardest and most demanding of the Ardennes Classics, as well as being the last race, I thought a good result might have been a little beyond me. So I was very happy to be in the group sprinting for 3rd place and eventually finishing 6th.

I had good legs throughout the entire race and it was only within the last 20km that I began to run out of energy and suffer with cramps. Xavier Florencio did a great job helping me maintain a good position in the bunch leading into several important parts of the race while Carlos Sastre and Philip Deignan rode the front after Schlek attacked. Overall the Cervelo Team were a great support.