Australian Richie Porte from Sky has captured his second win in the French classic after an excellent time trial performance where he overcame 36 seconds deficit to the previous leader and the hosts favorite Tony Gallopin.

The first leader of the race was young Polish world champion Michal Kwiatkowski from Etixx-Quickstep who won the prologue in Paris and kept the yellow jersey during flat stages.

Richie Porte has made an important step to the victory in the mountainous stage 4 with the finish at Croix de Chaubouret where he escaped along with his Sky teammate Geraint Thomas and finished first. This left him only 1 second behind the race leader Kwiatkowski who finished third this day.

The classification was shuffled at the stage 6 where superb attack from Tony Gallopin gave him the yellow jersey and 36 seconds advantage over Richie Porte who has finished 1 minute later because of a crash which knocked him off the first chase group. Previous leader Kwiatkowski finished 2 seconds after Porte and gone to third in general.

The final stage was 9.6 km time trial to the city of Nice in heavy rain and strong wind. The winner Richie Porte has made it in 20 minutes 23 seconds, 29 seconds before Kwiatkowski and 1 minute 39 seconds before Gallopin. Kwiatkowski finished second in general and won the White Jersey for the best young rider. Slovenian Simon Spilak finished second in the time trial to claim 3rd place in the general.

The mountains classification was dominated by Thomas de Gendt from Lotto Belisol and the winner of Points Classification was Michael Matthews from Orica-GreenEDGE.

"It’s one of the iconic races and for me I think this one feels a little bit sweeter than the last one. It was hard, they threw everything they had at us yesterday and to win on the top of the Col d’Eze like the last time it’s incredible," Porte said.

This was very good and promising start of the season for Sky but Michal Kwiatkowski proved again that he will be a hard competitor this year.