Tejay van Garderen's fifth-place performance in Sunday's individual time trial at Paris-Nice helped the BMC Racing Team rider finish fourth overall, improving on his fifth place of a year ago.

Van Garderen finished the 9.6 km on the Col d’Èze climb 52 seconds slower than stage and overall race winner Richie Porte (Sky Procycling).

The performance was good enough to improve his overall placing from sixth to fourth. Andrew Talansky (Garmin-Sharp) finished second on the stage and second overall, while Jean-Christophe Peraud (AG2R La Mondiale) was third, 23 seconds ahead of van Garderen.

After the race van Garderen had mixed emotions when evaluating his performance in the race, "You always come to a race trying to win; I never come to a race thinking I want to get fourth place," van Garderen said on BMC’s website.

Looking ahead, though, van Garderen remained optimistic about the forthcoming challenges and heaped praise on the collective efforts of his team at the Paris-Nice, "But at the end of the day, the team rode amazingly all week. Everything is falling into place: protecting me on the hectic, flat stages and I even had a lot of support up in the mountains. So the team is riding perfectly so I can take a lot of confidence in that and it's still [only] March."