Alaphilippe🇫🇷 WON THE SPRINT OF THE BREAKAWAY! 😍🎉🥳🎉🥳🎉🇫🇷🍾🍾🍾🇫🇷😍

for 3^rd place, oops… 🤦 😥😥😥

It wasn’t a bad stage, there were lots of fights in the hills to determine the breakaway and lots of fights in the climbs and the final part with the breakaway, but it ended up once more with another UAE win.

They guys ranked 10^th to 13^th in GC won a bit of time. Given the gaps, it doesn’t change anything much. Just Rodriguez (Inéos) passes Healy (EF) whose team miscalculated the pace needed to pull the peloton a bit.

Some say that UAE wanted to catch the breakaway along as it contained Visma riders, and that this would have been motivated by the team classification.

Dunno.

Jorgenson (Visma), 10^th in GC this morning, 9^th after Evenepoel’s withdrawal,who never finished better than 8^th in a Grand Tour, opting for dropping in order to voluntarily lose time, seems to support my theory of yesterday: there are less and less riders interested in giving their best for the original goal of a Grand Tour, to such extent that it is getting more and more ridiculous.

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L. Martinez did a peculiarly bad descent of the Tourmalet, staying too upright on his bike for his own good (and for the good of his trajectories). Hard to say from TV cameras whether the fog played a role in that.

Yes, he tried, but nobody joined him when he was waiting for more riders. Nevertheless, the consequences of no early breakaway were: 1. no gap for the breakaway before the Tourmalet, 2. a different composition of the breakaway, only climbers.

Point #2 should have been an advantage for the breakaway, but there again, everyone in the breakaway seemed a bit powerless, a bit sleepy. Except for L. Martinez, nobody made a great impression in the first climb(s) like it is sometimes the case before failing in the end (and that was the expected fate for Martinez given his previous stages). Arensman played his card later, others just had no card to play (Johannessen tried, though).

After the stage, I still don’t know who was right and who was wrong 🤷‍♂️ 😉

I mean, Pogatchar didn’t win but UAE led the peloton and never let the gap get over 4 mn. And they led it fast enough in the last climb. But not so much before that climb, losing downhill what they had gained uphill.

Pogatchar probably could have caught up Arensman (not easily though) but he did not nothing but follow in the last climb.

It looked like the goal was to bring back Johannessen and such (showing than no one in the top-10 was allowed to get away), but not necessarily to win the stage unless it fell naturally into their hand.

It is strange that they didn’t connect the back and front stripes.

Pyrénées are Evenepoel’s kryptonite.

I don’t know but he was unwell yesterday already.

Cras and Evenepoel out, sitting in a car.

Skjelmose out, riding into a traffic sign.

Will Schmidt make it? He was struggling to keep wheels on the flat.

I suppose so. The way I see it, there should be a large and long breakaway today, so anyway sprinters wishing to score points would need to get into the breakaway (and with the long flat start, they have it comparatively easy).

Well, we already got the first part wrong 😂

No one managed to break away on the flat. They were a number of attempts, but almost everyone seemed powerless compared to the previous breakaway days.

I don’t think so, but we shall see in a few hours 😀

I suppose so. The way I see it, there should be a large and long breakaway today, so anyway sprinters wishing to score points would need to get into the breakaway (and with the long flat start, they have it comparatively easy).

GG gaps are such that even guys ranked 10^th in the general classification (14 minutes behind) might already be allowed to join the breakaway and win the stage. 12^th is 20 minutes behind. Even Johannessen, ranked 8^th is more than 10 minutes behind the leader (but only 3 minutes behind the podium, though).

The very strange thing is that Evenepoel is supposed to be super strong at staying forever on a TT bike in perfect aero position. It made it even more surprising to see others on the aerobars most of the time but not him, when one would have expected the opposite.

He didn’t seem to even try to get on the aerobars, alternating between positions when one position became awkward. It looked like a pre-established choice.

Evenepoel took a TT bike but basically never used the areobars. That’s the worst possible idea: carrying those things for nothing, and spending all the time on the shitty lower bar that is only meant to be used less than 10% of the time.

Good performance by Roglitch. I am just a bit disappointed that he didn’t show up wearing a floral speedo.

If Visma changes tactics from now on, it can be interesting for breakaways, as without Visma’s accelerations, only UAE would be available to lead a chase and is also relatively weak (as a team). Well, “interesting” on stages which have not been marked by Pogatchar, where the UAE team will concentrate its efforts…

About Evenepoel, it is a pity that other GC contenders do not bury him when they have a chance. They should know that he can be knocked out and throw the towel when he is on the ropes, but if on the contrary you give him a rest at this moment, he will come back.

It’s a good thing for future breakaway candidates that Evenepoel managed to limit the damage and stay on the podium, not giving up on GC 😅

Coquard made it in time! He managed to break one finger of his right hand, while catching a bag before mid-course… No idea how one can hold the bar in climbs, or brake in descent like that…

Lenny Martinez lost the mountain jersey because he didn’t contest the uncontested 4^th category of the day… (the point was taken by his teammate so that no one else could get it, but the calculation was bad).

Could you rephrase, please? (Sorry, it’s just that I don’t quite get what you mean.)

After a bit of thinking, I reckon that it is more a case of having a grand maximum of 15 riders interested in GC and trying their best. So someone who isn’t a strong rider but gives his best on a good day can relatively easily get in the top-20, sometimes top-15 when several GC riders are unwell and you had a little bit of advance thanks to a breakaway.

The same happened on the first Time Trial. There were like, what… only 20, 25 riders actually giving their best. Many openly declared it was a rest day for them…

It’s starting to make me question what the point of a Grand Tour like the Tour of France is becoming, when we have a vast majority, perhaps up to 170 riders (!), which doesn’t give a damn about making the best result.

It used to be that at least young riders / first-time participants would try to do their best at GC, but I am not sure that it is very common any more. Even the new guys seem to just do their semi-skilled worker task as assigned by the boss in order to get their big pay check, and no more (they might even get punished if they do more, in a few teams). When I hear more and more often from people who went to see the race on the roadside that “hey, it was cool to see XXX climbing this hard climb in wheelie, he looked fine” about riders who were dropped earlier in the race, I feel that the spirit of GTs has been turned into a joke. Until, say, 25 years ago (random number of years), the last riders really struggled, they certainly weren’t going to do wheelies, they were dropped because they were weaker and exhausted. They we got the top-teams trains, with riders specialised into working hard for 20 mn and then relaxing until the finish line; and now it is general.

If it keeps deteriorating this way, some sort of a reform will become necessary. Starting with reducing delays. What does a GT mean, where is the endurance, where is the attrition, when a majority of riders only actively ride 40 km every 3^rd day and consider the rest as a… rest?