JUST days after smashing the World Hour Record, Alex Dowsett’s glorious May continued.

Last week he won the 26.1km fourth stage time-trial of Germany’s top stage race, the Bayern Rundfahrt, and in doing so took the race lead by a mere two seconds which he and his Movistar team-mates then defended in Sunday’s final stage.

And after taking his first ever overall stage race win, the Maldon-born rider said: “I’m really good at losing yellow jerseys, so keeping this one makes me really happy.”

With sprinters having dominated and won the opening three stages, Dowsett had been testing his race form by getting stuck into the fight for mid-race bonus sprints and was handily positioned in 13th place going into the time-trial stage having lost only 20 seconds to the then overall race leader.

But with the attempt on the Hour Record having dominated his thinking and training so far this year – the five stage Rundfahrt was only the fifth road race this season for the 26-year-old Movistar Team rider – the Commonwealth Games time trial gold medallist was unsure of his TT form going into the race and was pleased with his time of 31m 33s.

He said: “I hadn’t really done much training at all after the Hour.

“Last week I started a two-day race in Spain but on the first day it went straight into the mountains and after I’d done my work at the front of the race I wasn’t able to race on day two.

“So I guess that before I started in Germany I’d only had three rides since Manchester.

“I’m in good shape from the training for the Hour, I know my overall power output is good, but because of the muscle I built up riding so much on the track I’ve probably got a couple of kilos to lose.

“I’m happy to have won this one because I wasn’t sure I could even make it – it was my first real, proper time trial since last year.

“I wasn’t comfortable on the bike, and that made it not the best TT I could do.

“My power wasn’t the best, so I had to ride a clever TT, focusing on when to put the power down and to take some rest was the key.

“I was really pedalling more with my head than my legs.”

That win gave Dowsett the precarious two-second race lead going into the nearly 198km final stage that finished in Nurnberg.

That gave him and his team-mates the difficult task of protecting that slender advantage that could so easily have been pulled back if second-placed rider Tiago Machado (Team Katusha) outwitted them and picked up any mid-race sprint time bonuses.

But such was Dowsett and his team’s determination to hold onto the race lead that from the very start of that final stage they had everything covered and Dowsett coming home in 18th place on the stage, four places ahead of his Portuguese challenger, sealed his debut overall stage race win.

He said: “It was amazing to have the whole team working for me.

“Everyone committed at 100 per cent, more or less from kilometre zero.

“Really all of the guys gave their best. It was so fantastic that even inside three kilometres to go, the Movistar Team was still sending guys to the front to make sure the bunch came all together.

“When I crossed the finish, it was phenomenal.”

Dowsett thinks that, at present, races like the Rundfahrt, five or six days racing including a time trial, are what he can do well in and his past results bear this out but now his thoughts are all focussed on July and hopefully a first start in the Tour de France.

He said: “The team told me just to concentrate on the Hour and then take things from there.

“Winning the Rundfahrt won’t have done me any harm in putting my name up there with the team’s management for the Tour squad.

“I go out to Majorca this weekend for some good road training then I’ve got the Tour de Suisse and the Nationals when I hope to win back my time trial champion’s jersey then we’ll just have to see.”