Van Garderen clocked 53:24 in somewhat rainy conditions on the 32kilometre course that featured two categorized climbs. His time stood – partly helped by stronger rain showers for many riders after him – until eventual fifth-place finisher Alejandro Valverde (Movistar Team) arrived in a time 1’21” faster. Van Garderen said a planned switch from his BMC teammachine SLR01 to the BMC timemachine TM01 at the top of the final climb definitely helped.

"We thought it would be faster to switch bikes and it was," he said. "I'm satisfied with my result. I wanted to go out for myself and have a good ride today. It's been somewhat of a disappointing Tour for me." Chris Froome (Sky Procycling) took the stage win in 51:33 to increase his lead and defeat runner-up Alberto Contador (Saxo-Tinkoff) by nine seconds.

Evans Going For Stages

Cadel Evans announced before the time trial that he would not be "going flat out" and Directeur Sportif John Lelangue said the past Tour de France champion's result – 167th, 8’04” behind – was not a concern. "The plan was not to go for it, to lose time – maybe a little bit voluntarily," he said. "We wanted to make an easy time trial and not to take any risks in the downhill and then concentrate on the next three mountain stages."

Evans said he has had to revise his original goal to do "a reasonable Giro and a very good Tour" after a third place at the Italian race in May. "At this point, it looks like the Giro took a lot more out of me than I first thought," he said. "It's something that we tried knowing that there was a certain element of [risk] riding the Giro and the Tour. I could have not done the Giro and maybe come here fresher but not as good and still perform poorly so that was a decision we made back in March."