As the race moved north towards the Swiss border the high mountains finally came into play in this year’s race, and the true contenders came to the top.

But it was Hesjedal who proved to be the best of them on the day, attacking out of the select chase group on the climb to Cervinia and keeping them at bay to take back the pink jersey.

“Today I had good legs and decided to test them,” said Hesjedal.

“The team was excellent once again and the day just unfolded perfect. Thanks to all the supports out there! Its been an amazing race so far.”

Five argyle jumped to the front of the peloton with less than 40km to go to start chasing down the breakaway before the final climb to the finish line.

There Christian Vande Velde and Peter Stetina rode with Hesjedal near the front of the shrinking main group as the break disintegrated. As the stage winner rode on to victory Hesjedal remained poised and drove in to the finish to take the pink jersey back to the team.

“I’ve been around for a while, just persisting and plugging away, and the team’s been incredible,” Hesjedal about having the race lead.

“It’s the team coming together, we’ve never done anything like this before,” Vande Velde told VeloNews.

The team is doing more than that as Vande Velde himself now sits fourth on the overall, with Stetina right behind him in fifth. As well, Stetina now has the outright lead on the Best Young Rider classification and wears the white jersey!

After some good results during the hilly classics and second in the GC at Romandie it seemed like we were always present in the races but still yearning for more.

We flew into Denmark on the Tuesday after Romandie — just a day at home before our four week trek through Denmark and Italy. We had to pull in Ramunas Navardauskas to replace an injured Thomas Dekker. I had given Ramunas a heads up the last day of Romandie he may have to go to Italy.

He was just back after a collarbone break and still not in top form in Romandie but willing to go to Italy even though as he told me he was not wanting to disappoint. He had 12 hours at home before repacking his bags but did it as a true pro, without complaint.

Robby Ketchell our sports science director planned out the training for the days before the prologue in Denmark and the emphasis was the TTT in Verona on stage 4. We were hoping for a good result with Rasmussen in the prologue so TT work was in order.

Peter Stetina was a little nervous with so much expectation within the team that won the TTT in last year’s Tour de France. Climbers are usually not the strongest at the TTT but with some 5km efforts and repetition of the start order confidence grew that we could pull it off in Verona.

Rasmussen finished a fine third in the prologue and with six riders inside the first 30 we had done our homework. Navardauskas lead the leaders table for two hours before his time was beaten and finally finished sixth — so he was obviously in form.

Stages one and two ended in bunch sprints with Tyler Farrar finishing fourth and third respectively. Ramunas was part of a six-man break that lasted 170km on stage two so the boy who worried he was not good enough had other people worried!

The transfer to Italy was an undertaking to say the least but all arrived in Verona monday night before the rest day. It was not a rest day as such as the tension was building for the TTT. Robby Ketchell had flown in early to Verona and gone over the course with local ex-pro Eros Poli. He had seen where we had to win time and on the rest day the boys went over the course and did some efforts to keep the motor running nicely.

Today everything was set and organized to run like clockwork. The official warm-up on a closed circuit gave us the chance to go over the course at a good pace to really test the corners and climb. I thought they were riding too hard during the warm up as we sat on 55-60kph on the flat but we let them be.

Other teams saw us or were passed by us as they warmed up and I saw they were impressed as the boys drilled it in training only hours before the event. The pace they rode in training would give them the confidence in the technical parts of the course to win time on the opponents.

We started well and then Vande Velde had a moment through a corner and was a little gapped. We had to call them to ease and reorganize to let him get on. It took 3km before we hit cruise speed and at the first split we were up on Katusha.