STAGE 6

An all-out defense of Linda Villumsen's lead by Columbia-HTC in the Tour of Thuringen this weekend netted the Danish rider the overall win on Sunday, resulting in three wins in one day for Columbia-HTC.

"It was a really important victory both for Linda and Columbia-HTC," said team manager Petra Rossner.  "Thuringen is one of the hardest stage races of the season, just one hilly day after another with nowhere flat to recover, and Linda and the team had to dig deep to defend her lead.  We lost Emilia Fahlin early on in the race, because she crashed out and hurt her knee, which stretched us a bit more because we were down to five riders."

After Villumsen took the lead with a solo attack on stage three, Rossner said Saturday's hilly stage put the team under a lot of pressure - but they responded well. "Yesterday [Saturday] was the most complicated day of all.  The attacks kept on coming from all sides, and Linda's advantage overall finally dropped from 1 minute 49 seconds to just 30 seconds.  But she seems to be getting more and more sure of herself, and here in Thuringen she's taken another huge step up in stage racing. At the same time, [team-mate] Kim Anderson did a great job acting as captain on the road whenever I had to follow breaks ahead.  And for the whole squad it was important to win because we've not had Judith [Arndt] or Ina [Yoko-Teutenberg] here."

"But the others really showed their own strength, too," added Rossner.  "Personally, I've rarely seen anything like the way this team rode here in Thuringen. They were amazing."

Villumsen's victory comes on a day of multiple success for Columbia-HTC, who also won the final stage of the Tour de France with Mark Cavendish of Great Britain and the final stage of the Tour of Saxony in Germany with Thomas Lovkvist of Sweden.

STAGE 3

A courageous solo attack earned Columbia-HTC's Linda Villumsen both the stage win and the lead in the Thuringen Rundfahrt in Germany on Thursday. The Danish rider took off in heavy rainfall during the final hour's racing for an impressive lone victory in the 130-kilometre Rund um Schleiz stage.

"Linda did brilliantly.  The bunch caught up with her once, but she just broke away again and kept going right to the finish," said team manager Petra Rossner.  "She first went about 35 kilometres from the line, and that didn't work out.  After that, she managed to go clear and had an advantage of about 24 seconds for quite some time.  Then the gap suddenly lifted to 40 seconds and we realised she could move into the overall lead as well.  The situation was very good for us because we had Kim [Anderson] and Luise [Keller] in the chase group behind. That made the other teams hesitate.  So we kept on yelling 'go,go,go' to Linda form the team car and she finally made it to the finish line alone."

Rossner said later that Villumsen's victory was particularly pleasing because the team had been in the thick of the action for the first two days races, but had not taken any wins.

"We've been in the breaks, looking for success, and it hadn't worked out.  So we had a team meeting this morning and decided we'd continue attacking regardless."  Rossner said Villumsen's first challenge as race leader will come on Friday, with a 23-kilometre time trial in Treibes.

"First she has to recover from today's big effort, and then we'll see what happens. But in any case, this was an amazing victory."