Bradley Wiggins was full of praise for Team Sky's performance in the team time trial stage of the Giro d'Italia and was heartened to see everyone giving it their all as they battled to second position.

The nine-man squad lost Chris Sutton to a puncture early in the day but still managed to hurtle around the 32.5 kilometre route in 36 minutes and 50 seconds, which was just 13 seconds adrift of the triumphant Liquigas team.

Wiggins was a key player in that encouraging display and appeared to show no ill effects from the crashes on stages two and three which had cut short his spell in the pink jersey to just one day.

When we caught up with him at the finish line in Cuneo he told us: "It's always disappointing when you lose a bike race, but we couldn't have gone any faster and did the best we could as a unit.

"When it rained the speed obviously dropped off a little, but I don't think we could have made any time up elsewhere on the course.

"We were lucky in a sense that we didn't get any rain at the finish. We kept the speed going well in those last five kilometres and were happy in as much as we got it all out.

"Some of the guys were a bit disappointed because they felt they could have contributed more, but you always get that in a team scenario. For me personally, I felt that everyone played their role and we couldn't really have done anything more given the conditions."

Looking ahead

Although Wiggins is no longer focusing on the general classification, he is still hoping to play a prominent role in the weeks to come and has not ruled out another push for a stage victory.

He added: "Three crashes in two days have kind of dropped me out of contention now, but I still really enjoy this race and riding it for three weeks, I can't fail to get something out of it. Those crashes might even prove to be a blessing in disguise in terms of pressure.

"I'm still going to have a good go on some of the mountain days, and to challenge for another stage win would be nice.

"I'll be hopefully helping out in the sprints too. Greg [Henderson] is flying but he's not really had that full slingshot at the line yet so we'll be looking to do that for him over the next few days."