"The priority was to help Skjelmose" - Mads Pedersen explains self-sacrifice at La Vuelta

Mads Pedersen was one of the favourites to win stage 5 of the Vuelta a España this Wednesday, but was dropped early on and couldn't fight for a result. The Danish rider explained that he didn't have many hopes of sprinting, despite having an almost tailor-made day for him. Pedersen took responsibility for helping Mattias Skjelmose during the race: “As I said before the stage, the priority was to help Skjelmose,” Pedersen said in an interview with TV2 following the stage. Pedersen was dropped during the hilly section of yesterday's stage of the Vuelta, which had him and Matthew Brennan as favourites. However, Pedersen, the recent green jersey winner at the Tour de France, is one of the sprinters who climbs best in the peloton. The difficulties were explained by his own decision to work for Mattias Skjelmose, eighth on the general classification and the German team's leader. “We never really got proper crosswinds, but the race was ridden as if there were crosswinds, and that still costs a lot of energy when you’re doing that work,” he said. Despite this race situation, Pedersen himself, and not one of the team's six other riders, kept Skjelmose in position during a tense phase of the race. Because of this work, he didn’t finish in the sprint. The unexpected race situation caught team DS Kim Andersen off guard: “We hadn't discussed the fact that he wouldn’t be able to compete,” essentially confirming Pedersen was not racing according to the team's overall plan, which would have been to contest the final sprint. Pedersen did not plan on fighting for a sprint, as he had little hope of making it to the finish and sprinting. The stage ended in a sprint with Matthew Brennan beating Jordi Meeus. Pedersen was absent in what was one of his best opportunities to take a stage win at this Vuelta. “I knew it was going to be a hard day, and I don’t think I had particularly high hopes of making it to the finish and sprinting because I knew I would have to do so much work for Mattias today,” he explained. In Pedersen’s point of view, the priority of the day was Skjelmose’s overall classification, and there was no secondary objective: “All in all, it’s fine. He didn’t lose any time, so everything went as it should.” The promotional subscription block and unrelated author bio were removed.