A story from the 1973 Tour de France
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The break’s lead ballooned up to over 16-minutes, Powless gobbled up the points on the three minor climbs along the route - he is really grinding out that lead, it’s a most impressive display of fortitude.
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At 60-km to go tragedy struck when Mark Cavendish crashed to the ground, breaking his collarbone. He’d come so close to winning and capturing the all-time stage winner record in Bordeaux, so the shock of his Tour ending in that brutal way was shared by us all.
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The Alpecin-Deceunink team have been perfecting their lead-out train all year and the fruits of that labor have been on clear display this Tour. It is an incredible team, beginning with the powerful Dane, Soren Kragh Andersen - a double Tour stage winner in his own right - who keeps Philipsen protected until the train is ready to be launched.
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Van Aert was crazy. Watching him is as close as we’ll ever get to seeing the physicality of an Eddy Merckx. Of course, times are different and comparisons difficult to make, but as my keen cycling observer friend Wade Hinderling puts it: “If the Tours of the 1960’s and 70’s were designed like todays, only the tiny climbers like Charly Gaul would have ever won.”
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Up front, Van Aert was incredible, constantly going off the front forcing the big group to ever harder efforts - efforts that were beginning to kill the desperately chasing UAE team. With 33-k to the finish, Van Aert was the virtual Yellow Jersey, Hindley second and Buchmann third.
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The real mountains begin today, and as is now the norm, the race will explode into action from the gun as the riders who’ve already lost chunks of time in the Basque Country hope for a bit of leeway from the controlling Jumo-Visma and UAE teams.
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UAE came out blazing on Stage 2, the longest of the Tour, 208.9-kilometes from Vitoria-Gastiez to San Sebastian. While American Neilsen Powless made the early morning break, and in the manner of his EF Education Easy Post teammate Magnus Cort last year, putting his all into grabbing KOM points along the route to add to his Polka Dot Jersey tally, the UAE kept an iron grip control of the peloton the entire day.
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Of course, the race waits for no one and up front the boys were raging. Carapaz’s teammate, the excellent Nielsen Powless took the KOM points on the penultimate climb, putting him in the Polka Dot jersey, a recompense for their EF Education-EasyPost podium hopes being crushed by that crash.
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Yet, just as in Paris-Roubaix, and of course through no fault of the winners nor of any intention of diminishing the value of their victories, the two promised matchups between great champions were denied the public.
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World Champion Evenepoel is finally, like Zeus descending from Mount Olympus, abandoning his North African altitude training camp where he’s been since the beginning of March - having left only to race the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya - and is ready for his assault on “the most beautiful classic”, and his main objective for the season, the Giro d’Italia which begins May 6th.
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Behind, nothing but gaps and struggling racers: Mads Pedersen was in the first chase group along with Alexander Kristoff, while even further behind was group three headed by Ineos’s Connor Swift fighting with everything he had to bring Ganna – who’d really gone backwards on those stones –into contention
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Van Aert has been slightly off the mark this Spring. He struggled on the Poggio, couldn’t follow the surges of Pogačar and VdP on the cobbled climbs and is still in recovery mode from his crash last Sunday. Is the Jumbo-Visma team completely dedicated to his cause?
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A crash, a gap, now the sight of a chasing Tadej Pogačar, 29” down, led by two UAE teammates, while the race continued to set a record pace, almost 100 kilometers covered in the first two-hours.
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The saving grace of cycling, the reason fans will stand for hours waiting to catch a glimpse, is that cycling almost always, no matter what happens in the race, offers up an exciting finish. A sprint from two to 180 riders is always thrilling.
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43-K to go and the Paterberg, the short, 20% cobbled beauty where Pogačar came out to play. He ripped up the climb, in the saddle while everyone else stood and danced for their lives, pulling out van der Poel and again, a trailing Van Aert, with Mohorič, after one of his patented descents, being the only one able to bridge.
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It was clear, right from the first pedal strokes, why there’s so much hullabaloo surrounding tubeless. They are wonderfully lively and sing to you with a high-pitched ocean wave sound, certainly brought about by the fact that they are hollow with no tube to dampen noise.
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The peloton raced to the base of the Poggio in the usual fraught manner with another US rider, EF Education-EasyPost’s Neilson Powless, staying in the front, another sign of his steady, superb progress. Five-men of Bahrain-Victorious, with their 2022 winner Matej Mohorić in tow, blasted through the tight entrance to the climb, holding the front until, with 2.5-k to the top, UAE’s Tim Wellens surged to the front with Tadej Pogača on his wheel, setting up the move anticipated by the entire peloton and viewing public, stringing out the bunch a long, suffering line.
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The Stage 10 Time Trial showed us that we were witnessing something and someone very special. Evenepoel, using a 60-tooth front chainwheel (normal for TT’s is now 58…) redefined ‘warp speed’ in cycling by winning the 30.9-kilometer individual race by a whopping :48 over reigning Olympic TT champ Rogič at an average speed of 55.676 kph.
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An attack on Van Aert or Vingegaard is an attack on the entire team, so closely do they all train, race and live together at altitude camps and stage races, making me wonder how Sepp Kuss must have felt reading this in what is essentially his hometown paper. Welcome home Sepp!
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