With stage 3 winner Lorena Wiebes (Team SD Works) out of the race, Charlotte Kuhl (Team DSM-Filmenig) was listed as the favorite to win stage 6 of the Tour de France. Unfortunately for her, however, Emma Norsgaard (Movistar Team) escaped from the breakaway group early in the race by one second, making it a sprint battle for second place.

Arriving at the team bus, Kuhl looked disappointed, handed his bike to the mechanics, and hugged his teammates who offered words of encouragement. Kuhl then disappeared into the team bus for a while, but came out again to answer questions from the media on only three channels: Cycling News, Dutch TV channel L1, and Belgian TV channel Sporza.

"I think it's my biggest nightmare ever. Certainly, I felt better than I do now," Kool expressed her feelings in strong terms.

"I won a sprint in the Tour and now there's someone right in front of me, right next to me. I am still young and I believe that this victory will come sooner or later. But every time you have a chance in life to win a stage of the Tour, you want to win," she continued.

Unlike previous Tour de France femme stages where escapees held off the peloton, Kool thought there was good cooperation in the chase and the crash at the tram crossing in the final kilometer was not due to a near-miss.

"We really gave it our all and I think a lot of the other teams helped us. That wasn't the problem. The gap was too big even before the crash," commented the 24-year-old Dutchwoman.

Kool crashed on one of the four section climbs of the day, and the team brought her back to the pack before taking charge of the chase behind a breakaway group that included Agnieszka Karniak-Sojska (Canyon-SRAM) and Sandra Alonso (Selatigit-WNT), in addition to Norsgaard She worked hard to.

"I knew I still had a lot of time to come back. Maybe we lost a little bit of time before we could really go after it. But we knew we could pull it off. We always have to keep believing and we know we can make up time quickly. We were hoping to catch up with them on the line, but unfortunately it didn't happen. Three riders were too strong today," Kuhl said.