"A win is sometimes decided by very little," continued Demare. "It's in my favour today.
"The team has done a tremendous job. I only had 100 metres to overhaul Cavendish.
French rider Arnaud Demare claimed his second win in two days with a thrilling sprint finish for stage six of the Giro d'Italia on Thursday..
Spaniard Juan Pedro Lopez holds the leader's pink jersey which the Trek rider grabbed Tuesday on Mount Etna.
"It was all under the control of the sprinters' teams," said the Spaniard.
"It will be very different tomorrow but we're ready with the team to defend the Maglia Rosa."
Friday's seventh stage is a gruelling 196km ride between Diamante and Potenza including four climbs between the Calabrian coast inland to Basilicata with a summit finish.
AP – Wout van Aert had just concluded one of the most remarkable performances of anyone in the Tour de France with a thrilling sprint victory on the Champs-Elysees in Paris when he was asked about his Olympic ambitions.
The breakthrough Belgian star, who also won a time trial and mountain stage on the iconic Mount Ventoux, will be lining up at Musashinonomori Park on Saturday for the road race before tackling the time trial a few days later.
“I guess I’ll try to win both,” he said with what amounted to an audible shrug, “but of course it’s going to be really difficult. Though for now, I’m still overwhelmed by the victories of this weekend.”
There’s the rub: Nobody quite knows how van Aert and the rest of the riders who will be jetting from the finish line in Paris to the starting line in Tokyo this week will perform after three hard weeks riding around France. Cycling stands out among Olympic sports for having its biggest, most prestigious event serving as an appetiser to the Summer Games. Overall Tour winner Tadej Pogecar of Slovenia will also be competing in Tokyo.
Paolo Bettini spent eight days wearing the king of the mountains jersey before winning gold at the 2004 Athens games, where Axel Merckx — who eventually won the king of the mountains classification — grabbed the bronze medal for Belgium. And at the 2000 Games, Germany’s Jan Ullrich followed his second-place Tour finish to Lance Armstrong — who, of course, was stripped of his win — by winning the gold medal in Sydney from a three-man breakaway.
But for the most part, the three-week grind of the Tour de France tends to leave riders weary when they line up for the Olympics. After all, it’s the Tour rather than the once-every-four-years Summer Games that they target above all else.
Take as an example the 2012 London Games. The British were still celebrating three stage wins by sprint superstar Mark Cavendish along with Bradley Wiggins’ overall title at the Tour de France the previous week when the duo lined up on The Mall with the hopes of the home nation riding on their shoulders.
Everything unravelled for the four-man British squad, though. Wiggins and teammates David Millar, Ian Stannard and Chris Froome never factored into the race, and Cavendish missed the key move, leaving him out of position to sprint for the win.
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