Starting in the first hour of racing in the 2011 Eneco Tour today proved to be just the ticket for Team RadioShack's Jesse Sergent who stormed the 14.7 km/9.1 mi time trial course in Roermond, Netherlands to take his third victory of the season.

The overall Eneco Tour lead is currently held by Norwegian Edvald Boaddon Hagen of Team Sky.

Sergent (23) rode the technical course in mostly dry conditions to post an early time to beat that held up throughout the stage. An untimely flat yesterday was bad luck for Jesse Sergent, knocking him out of contention for the overall, but the New Zealand native channeled his forces to turn things around in Friday's individual time trial.

"I did not expect this at all," Sergent commented after his stage victory and added "After my 7th place in the opening prologue, my confidence was up and I was hoping for a top 5 today. But my back luck of yesterday became my good luck today. I only had 2K on wet roads."

Team RadioShack sports director Dirk Demol evaluated Sergent's performance, saying, "Jesse did an almost perfect TT. He was faster than specialists like Alex Rasmussen who did his TT in the same circumstances as Jesse. I think he only misjudged the final corner - he was going so fast." Sergent averaged 49.2 km/h (30.6 mi/h) on the course.

"It's hard for me to say what kind of time trial I prefer," Sergent added and continued "I was excellent (2nd) in the Tour of Austria on a 30 K flat course without corners. But today was very technical and I won, so I don't know."

"Jesse comes from the track," Demol stated and added "We take care to not burn him out. Even in 2010 with Trek-Livestrong he didn't do too many road races. This year after a strong spring season, along with a silver medal in the men's individual pursuit at the Track World Championships in March, he took a break after Paris-Roubaix. He then came back to racing in Luxemburg and Wallonie."