Axel Zingle: “Tomorrow’s final climb is too hard for me on paper”

August 12 ^th 2022 - 17:16 [GMT + 2]

It has been a pretty tense stage, especially in the final. But, overall, I would say it was an easy day for me – maybe a little less for my teammates, who had to work at the front. They did a perfect job and we even got some bonus seconds in the final intermediate sprint. It was a good day in the Midnight Sun jersey.

At the team meeting I said I would decide whether I had a good feeling or not to go for the bunch sprint in the final kilometres. I reckoned the mood was very nervous and, with 500 meters to go, I saw some riders moving from right to left and thought it was too dangerous a sprint for me to get in the mix. I decided to just stay on the bunch and think of tomorrow’s queen stage. We will see there how my climbing legs are. I knew climbing would be important here, so I did some efforts on training to prepare for this – and they went well. The final climb is too hard for me on paper, but we will do everything in our hands to keep this jersey.