Fabio Aru maintained a conciliatory line towards Chris Froome during the rest day in the Dordogne, seeking to play down any apparent differences with the Tour de France leader after Sunday’s dramatic mountain stage through the Jura, where the Italian – who lies second to the yellow jersey by just 18sec – had appeared to attack the race leader when he needed to change his bike six kilometres from the top of the Mont du Chat.

“I stopped when I heard he had a problem. I heard on my radio that he was 15sec behind. I did nothing at all when I knew that Froome was in trouble,” said the Sardinian, who maintained that he did not see the race leader waving his arm in the air, in spite of the fact that he was immediately behind the yellow jersey. “So I agree with Chris that attacking the race leader when he has a problem is not done.”

Aru, winner of the stage to La Planche des Belles Filles last Wednesday, was also keen to build bridges over an incident in which it appeared that the three times Tour de France winner had ridden the Italian into the crowd. “I think it was an involuntary gesture on his part as he asked me to excuse him. He was about to crash so I touched him, there was nothing more in it. There were a lot of people about on the climb; it’s not always easy to handle your bike. It’s so noisy, it’s hard to see where the edge of the road is.”

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The Italian and his co-leader at the Astana team Jakob Fuglsang met the press at their hotel on the outskirts of Bergerac. The duo said they would try to use the fact that they are both within reach of the yellow jersey – Fuglsang lies fifth at 1min 37sec – to put the race leader and his team-mates under pressure when the race returns to the mountains on Thursday.

“Hopefully we can use it to our advantage,” said Fuglsang, who recently scored a surprise victory in the Critérium du Dauphiné. “That’s been the idea from the beginning – we saw at the Dauphiné it could be an advantage. Froome can’t go after everyone, but we’ll have to try and play it smart. He has to watch Bardet and [Rigoberto] Urán. We have to be clever, but I’m sure there is some way we can use it.”

Aru added that he had felt the Astana pair had no option but to assist the race leader in pursuit of Romain Bardet in the finale of Sunday’s stage, even though they actually ended up helping the yellow jersey gain time. “We had an advantage on other guys in the classification so we had to commit, to agree to help regain Bardet, so that we could gain time on others like [Nairo] Quintana and [Daniel] Martin, who are dangerous for us as well.”