Like most of the Bretagne-Seche team, Florian Vachon went on a discovery trip in his first Tour de France, having never raced more than eight days in succession in the past.

"I learnt a lot about myself and my capacities to recuperate. At the start, as we are a team of newcomers, we went into the unknown. I had only taken part in one-week races like Paris-Nice or the Dauphine, in which we were lucky to be invited," he said.

And things went relatively well for the 29-year-old rider from Montlucon. The first man to break away in stage 12 to St Etienne, he tried his luck again one week later on the road to Luchon.

"I struggled in the first week because you must learn to keep your place in the Tour peloton but I was much more comfortable in the second week. And then I proved by going in a break in stage 16 that I was also there in the third week. It was my goal to go into an "easy" break and also into a complicated one, with a chance to go all the way."

As a result, Vachon like his team-mates was a protagonist, which was also one of his team's objectives at the start in Leeds.

"I think we replied on the bike to criticism that we did not have our place on the Tour. If everything goes well until tomorrow, there will be nine of us in Paris. When you're a debutant and you're neither a great sprinter nor a climber, you have no other choice but to try to go into break and hope to make it to Paris. It's obviously my number one goal."