The 5th Tour of Norway headed for the high snowfields for Friday’s stage 3 on a 185 km stage that began in Skien and ended in Rjukan. The overcast skies and stiff wind across the wide open landscape made for difficult work from the peloton.

Tinkoff-Saxo’s Jesper Hansen was first over the top before making the long plunge into the finish line as the other GC hopefuls tried to reach the Danish rider. But Hansen was on a mission kept his position at the front by a margin of 37 seconds to Edvald Boasson Hagen (MTN-Qhubeka), earning his first professional win and taking the leader’s jersey in the process. Hansen, age 24, was sixth overall in the 2014 race. Alexander Kristoff rode in for a respectable 10th place.

"It was a hard stage and I believe that my chances for yellow overall are now gone, but I still have the green (points) jersey and I will try to keep that. Tomorrow is a mountaintop finish so for sure I will lose more time overall. I wasn’t sure really what group was ahead of us on today’s stage. Without radios sometimes you cannot tell and things become quite hectic. If I had thought I was several minutes behind I probably would not have tried so hard to keep coming, but with just one-and-a-half minutes I thought it was worth still fighting," said team leader Alexander Kristoff.

As he’d predicted, race leader Alexander Kristoff found the climbs out of his range and Team Katusha’s Norwegian rider sprinted in for 10th at 1.30 off the winning time of 4:46.30. Kristoff slips to sixth place overall behind the new race leader Hansen.

A five-man break held a time advantage until the category 1 climb with 30 km to go. It was then that the true climbers went to work to distance themselves from the rest of the peloton. Hansen’s attack on the climb was perfectly timed to keep his advantage to the line.

It’s more climbing on Saturday’s stage 4. The 167 km stage starts in Rjukan and ends in Geilo atop the climb to the cat. 2 Havsdalsgrenda.