Deuteron break-up reactions are analysed from a QCD-motivated point of view. Production of a nucleon with hard momentum is considered as a result of high gluon exchange between three quark clusters in the hidden-colour component of the deuteron wavefunction. It is shown that the model reproduces well the nucleon momentum distribution extracted from the (d,p) reaction at high energy, as well as the tensor analysing powers T20 of this reaction and of the reaction of elastic pd backward scattering.