While Tadej Pogačar's overall victory in the Tour de France now looks like a virtual certainty, the final Alpine battle of the race also saw some significant changes in the GC further down the rankings, with Felix Gall making a last-minute move into the top five overall at La Plagne.
Eighth in the 2023 Tour, the same year the Austrian climber won at Courchevel after crossing the Col de La Loze at the head of the field, barring absolute disaster, Gall now looks set for a career-best result in Paris in two days.
In the one change in the top five overall on stage 18, the 27-year-old was able to move ahead of Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) after the Slovenian GC veteran attacked early on, but then fell behind at La Plagne.
"I'm super happy with today, I didn't feel super good at the start on the Col de Pré," Gall told reporters about the first ascent of the day, "but after a while I got the legs going again."
Finally sixth on the line at 1:34, Gall recognised that while Pogačar, GC runner-up Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) and stage winner Thymen Arensman (Ineos Grenadiers) were concentrating on raising their arms one last time in the mountains, he was entirely focussed on doing as well as possible in the overall battle.
With that in mind, Decathlon AG2R put in a major effort on the lower half of La Plagne, as first Aurelien Paret-Peintre and then Robert Stannard laid down a viciously high pace to try and distance a struggling Roglič.
"The team did an incredible job on that final climb, we wanted to distance Roglič" - 12:39 down on the stage winner, more than ten minutes distant at the finish on Gall - "that was my goal," Gall said.
"The only thing I had in mind was to forget about the rest, and just think about GC, because it was always going to be hard with Vingegaard and Pogačar to win the stage. So for me, the GC was the only thing that counted."
Gall said that he had already exceeded his own expectations in the Pyrenees, and now, after taking sixth on the Loze and sixth at La Plagne, he could be more than satisfied with the Alps as well.
"It's not finished yet, but I was running seventh on the rest day, and I said then if I was seventh in Paris, I was going to be very happy with that. So now I'm in fifth, that feels even better."
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