Stage 4

The road

At the start

Verona, and the strongest team wins

Taylor Phinney carries the maglia rosa off the plane and into Italy, nine seconds up on Geraint Thomas and eighteen on Ramūnas Navardauskas — whose Garmin-Barracuda squad is the best team time trial outfit in the world. Thirty-three flat kilometres around Verona will do more to this general classification than three days in Denmark managed, and BMC have to hold a whole team off to protect their twenty-one-year-old.

How it was won

1. 121 km to go

   The assassin is dropped

   Alex Rasmussen was supposed to be the man who ended Phinney's reign; instead the Dane comes off the back of his own Garmin line, and Ramūnas Navardauskas moves quietly to centre stage.

2. 2At the line

   Garmin storm Verona

   Four years after Palermo, Garmin do it again: 37:04 around Verona, the fastest team in the race by a distance. Navardauskas takes the maglia rosa with Tyler Farrar ten seconds behind him, and after forty kilometres of racing against the clock it is Joaquim Rodríguez who is best placed of all the overall men.

The result