Olav Kooij sums up exactly what went wrong for Decathlon on Tour de France stage 11: 'everything went quiet'

So close, yet so far: Olav Kooij (Decathlon CMA CGM) was actually the fastest in the pack, but had to watch from very close range as Soren Waerenskjold of Uno-X raised his arms in victory. Kooij came very close to the Norwegian, who had pulled away in the final few hundred meters, but missed the victory by a hair.

"Just missed it. You could say that," Kooij himself concluded in a conversation with Han Kock of the NOS. “We were in a really good position. I thought Jasper Stuyven and then Cees Bol—that looked perfect. Cees actually took the lead, and then I tried to let Stuyven in between, but he was already done,” the Dutchman reflected.

And just like that, Bol suddenly opened up a gap. “I wasn’t right on his wheel at first… He pulled away for a moment, which made me think, ‘Oh no, this is going to fizzle out and Cees is going to win.’ But…,” Kooij sighs. “He really had a decent lead. Because I held back for a moment, I quickly lost speed. And Waerenskjold goes all in—it’s all or nothing for him—and he’s the one who keeps it up.”

The Norwegian shot out like a bullet from a cannon on the right side of the road, while Kooij, understandably, didn’t chase after his own lead-out. “Normally, there isn’t that much hesitation in a Tour sprint like that. I actually tried to let two or three riders get in between, but before I knew it, everything went quiet and no one went after them.”

Kooij is disappointed, but as always, he’s also realistic. “I think we did a lot of things really well today. It was just… well, just not quite enough,” he concludes, returning to the same point he started with. Kooij doesn’t have to be disappointed for long, though, because Thursday usually brings another chance for fast riders like him.