08 February 2013
IAM Cycling
“The last stage of this years’ Tour of Qatar was fast from the beginning.
Some riders tried to go into breakaways and others wanted to keep the bunch together for the intermediate sprints to gain some bonus seconds.
Omega-Pharma Quickstep worked good as a team and managed to protect their leader Cavendish and even put him in a good place for the final sprint – the result was a fourth consecutive stage win.
Our plan was to try to help Heinrich Haussler get a good place into the final sprint, like on basically every stage this week. Today the guys managed to find each other, but unfortunately they didn’t quite time their action right.
With so many other teams wanting to take their sprinter to the front for the final it was important to do the action exactly at the right time.
Anyway they are learning something every day and they will have use of that later in the season.
Tomorrow we fly to Oman, except for Heinrich who goes back to Europe where he’ll find a little different races
We will welcome Johann Tschopp here instead to test his form against many of the best climbers in the world!”
Kjell Carlström
