French stage wins in the Tour de France are increasingly rare, so when they do happen, there are wild celebrations. Julian Alaphilippe, the former world road race champion, raised his arms in triumph in Carcassonne, thinking he had won, only to be told seconds later that he had in fact finished third behind two Belgians.
Ahead of the crestfallen Alaphilippe, Tadej Pogacar’s UAE Team Emirates team-mate Tim Wellens took a solo win on stage 15 of the Tour, well ahead of compatriot Victor Campanaerts (Visma Lease-a-bike).
“Julian’s radio wasn’t working,” Alaphilippe’s team manager, Raphael Meyer, said in an effort to explain his rider’s ecstatic but misplaced fist pump across the line.
A win from the French rider would have been all the more remarkable, given that he had crashed earlier in the stage and popped back a dislocated shoulder, all on his own.
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For Jonas Vingegaard, second in the general classification over four minutes behind Pogacar, it was another stressful day in which his Visma Lease-a-bike team showed questionable strategy. He and his team have one day good, the next bad, while Pogacar and UAE remain a model of consistency.
If Vingegaard’s team increasingly resemble a house on fire, Pogacar’s remain an impregnable fortress. In the shadow of Carcassonne’s citadel the 34-year-old Wellens, already a stage winner in the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España, took the first Tour de France stage win of his career.
The Dane had been caught up in the same early crash that saw Alaphilippe come down. Inexplicably, as Vingegaard chased to rejoin the peloton, some of his team-mates, including Campanaerts, were at the front, forcing the pace and distancing their team leader.
It took a radio intervention from Pogacar’s own team car to return the goodwill shown to the Slovenian after his own crash 4km from the finish on stage 11, when the group – which included Ireland’s Ben Healy, wearing yellow – slowed to allow the reigning champion to rejoin.
On Sunday, Vingegaard and Florian Lipowitz rejoined the main group finally managed to rejoin the pack with 128 kilometres to race.
Even Pogacar seemed bemused by what was going on around him. “There were three Visma guys, all trying to go in the break again and they had Jonas chasing at the back,” he said. “It was just a weird situation.”
Wellens made his decisive solo move with 43km to race, on the Col de Fontbruno, and the Belgian champion never looked back, pushing on into the final kilometres on the rolling roads of the Languedoc to win by almost a minute and a half from Campanaerts.
Healy rolled in with the peloton alongside Pogacar and Vingegaard, 6′07 behind the stage winner. The 24-year-old, racing for ED Education-EasyPost, is now 10th in the general classification, 15 seconds back on Carlos Rodriguez (Ineos Grenadiers) with six stages left in this year’s Tour.
As the Tour began, Vingegaard’s wife and personal manager had criticised his team for failing to commit wholeheartedly to her husband’s cause.
On the road to Carcassonne, her fears seemed well-founded, with both Campanaerts and Wout Van Aert apparently racing for the stage win.
“I hope he gets the full support of the team, rather than there being all sorts of different goals,” Trine Vingegaard Hansen said this month.
“If you’re also aiming for stage wins with other riders, then those resources can’t be used for Jonas,” she said. “You can only respect how Tadej Pogacar’s team handles it. When he starts a race, there’s no doubt about who the leader is. Everyone knows their role. I think that’s super important.”
Pogacar, meanwhile, despite admitting after the stage to having a slight summer cold because of the fluctuating temperatures and too much time spent in air-conditioning, never looked in trouble.
As Vingegaard was pondering his team-mate’s motivations, Pogacar was becoming Wellens’s cheerleader in chief. “How is he looking?” he radioed his team car as Wellens progressed. “How does Tim look? You should reply, he looks fabulous!”
Monday is a rest day, while the 16th stage on Tuesday takes the peloton from Montpelier to the daunting Mont Ventoux, where Pogacar will almost certainly seek to increase his lead with a prestigious stage win. – Guardian
