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The records keep tumbling in the Tour de France. After race leader Tadej Pogacar shattered the record for the fastest climb of the Col du Tourmalet, Norwegian sprinter Søren Wærenskjold won the fastest-ever road stage, in a frenzied sprint into Nevers.
The Uno-X Mobility rider took the 11th stage five days after his teammate, Torsten Træen crashed out of the Tour in the yellow jersey, on the Pyrenean stage to Gavarnie-Gèdre.
The afternoon following France’s shock defeat to Spain at the World Cup, the sight of Julian Alaphilippe in the day’s four-man breakaway was a reminder of happier times. But that only led to renewed disappointment for home fans when the former world road race champion, who became a national hero when he held the yellow jersey for 14 days in the 2019 Tour, was dropped on the Côte-de-Chevannes, 38km from the finish.
That may have been 34-year-old Alaphilippe’s last hurrah in the Tour de France, although you can never say Nevers again.
With so few opportunities now remaining for the also-rans and sprinters in the peloton, the stage was raced at a furious pace, and once again the efforts of the breakaway came to nothing. With Alaphilippe long gone, the remaining trio were finally reeled in just five kilometres from Nevers.
The home nation wasn’t the only one recovering from a rough night and Tom Pidcock’s rollercoaster ride in his return to the Tour continues. Although he had crashed on Bastille Day, the double Olympic gold medallist was fit enough to continue and finished with the peloton in Nevers.
Pidcock attributed his crash on the descent of the Puy Mary to efforts to stop the tarmac from melting in extreme heat. “I don’t know what they do with the roads here, [but] when they clean it, they put all this white shit all over it and it makes it really slippery,” he said.
After another virtuoso display by race leader Pogacar, in the stage to Le Lioran, there was muted acceptance by his rivals the next day that they could not match the four-time winner. “You have to be realistic,” Jonas Vingegaard’s sport director Marc Reef said. “Pogacar is currently the strongest. Bravo to him.”
There was little booing to be heard on the road from Vichy to Nevers and Pogacar appeared to have more fans than ‘haters’, despite the occasional presence of signs disparaging to the UAE team.
He and his team have suffocated the peloton yet Pogacar has never hidden his disdain for his rivals, saying last summer that he will “probably not speak to 99% of the peloton when I finish my career. I will focus on my close friends and family.”
That sentiment, that he will not back off, if there are any chances for he and his team to control the race, is very much in evidence again this July. “In some ways, it pisses me off to see Pogacar win like that, because we too would also like to play at bike racing,” Kévin Vauquelin of the Netcompany Ineos team said.
“It’s tough on the breakaways,” the French rider said of the UAE Emirates XRG stranglehold, “but you also have to understand that when you have the strength to do it, then you might as well. What really discourages me is not having legs like Pogacar.”
