Romain Bardet, Jean-Christophe Péraud and Jan Bakelants (Ag2r) finished in the group of favorites in the 4th stage of the Tour de France. Hence, the two French team leaders got safely through a dangerous day.

"We spent the day fighting for posaition, but in the end the results are satisfactory. It's good for the morale. Now, we have to recover from the accumulated effort. The Tour is still long," said Jean -Christophe Péraud. 

"It was a day without loss of time, unlike all the other stages. We have limited the bleeding. It's good for the morale. The difficulty is positioning more than the pavés themselves. The cobblestones went pretty well. The hard part is after to fight, fight, fight. Now we will try to recover. We must save energy as much as we can. We will keep the strength for the team time trial."

"We were well supported throughout the day," Bardet added.

The leaders are 19th and 21st overall respectively. The team is 6th in the teams GC.