After a great team effort battling for the intermediate sprints and taking two of Team Sunweb’s three stage wins at the Tour de France Michael Matthews (AUS) has taken over the lead in the points classification.

With one goal at the forefront of their mind, Team Sunweb set out to take stage victories at the 2017 edition of the Tour de France. When the opportunity came to take additional points in the green jersey competition, the team rose to the challenge. With strong tactics Team Sunweb positioned Matthews to collect intermediate sprint points wherever they could in order to rebound on a tough deficit. Matthews now leads the classification with a total of 364 points, 160 points ahead of his nearest rival.

After the stage Matthews said: „After getting 50 points yesterday I knew that it was game on. I knew beforehand that I had to be active to get those 20 points today and was aware that even if I did get those points it was still going to be difficult. You never want to see a guy out of a race like this, it’s been such a good battle up to this point and I hope Kittel is ok.“

Team Sunweb’s Tour de France coach Aike Visbeek (NED) added: „We’ve put in a big effort into taking the points at the intermediate sprints to close the gap towards the green jersey. This isn’t the way that we wanted to take the lead after all of the work we had put in as a team for the points. We really put the pressure on and were prepared to fight all the way to Paris for this jersey.“