This ‘Tour’ is in fact a sort of Brittany → Lake Geneva straight line in 9 stages.
22 teams of 7 riders are engaged, including all top riders I believe.
This ‘Tour’ is in fact a sort of Brittany → Lake Geneva straight line in 9 stages.
22 teams of 7 riders are engaged, including all top riders I believe.
Stage 7 (Friday 1: 13:30–13:40 → 17:30–17:55)
This stage brings the riders into the Alps (Chartreuse), after about 100 flat kilometres. The finish line is at the bottom at a long descent. Will downhill abilities matter more than climbing ones? Riders who struggle in descents had better get a head start in the main climb.
Same winner as yesterday, Squiban (🇫🇷 UAE), this time from a breakaway.
Again, the FDJ team was pretty lethargic, not trying to catch up with the breakaway, not trying to finish the riders who had been dropped in the last climb, except for a mile or so before and after the pass.
Le Court had temporarily lost her yellow jersey, but she managed to catch up in the second half of the descent, and didn’t lose a second in the end.
Obviously, her team and herself see Vollering way above the others in the future stages. Well… this kind of overconfidence has already bitten her in the past, I think. She is still the favourite, but who knows what can happen when you chose to place yourself at the mercy of a bad day, an incident, a pee break?
I also didn’t understand that Le Net, FDJ teammate of Chabbey who wears the mountain jersey, didn’t contest the points to Squiban on the first two climbs despite being in the same breakaway. Chabbey wasn’t going to lose the jersey on this stage, given the poor points scale (the second climb was particularly under-categorised), but still… Now that I think of it, Squiban wasn’t lucky with pints the day before either: on top the second climb she passed in first position, they had put a time bonus sprint in place of a mountain sprint! That’s why she ends up with so few points, in spite of having ridden 5 out of 6 climbs in first position since we arrived in the (pre-)Alps.