Second place might well have been 102nd for Quinn Simmons who, despite his instant disappointment, showed on Thursday he has the ability to compete for a Tour de France stage win.
The US national champion nestled himself in the breakaway on day six to Vire Normandie, and ended as the day’s runner-up, almost three minutes behind the solo winner Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost).
When he returned to the Lidl-Trek bus afterwards, Simmons's team-mates congratulated him on a stage well raced. “Not well enough,” he quipped back. He then addressed the media as he spun slowly on the turbo.
“Unfortunately in cycling you only remember the winners,” Simmons said. “This rolling terrain at the end of a hard day is almost custom-made for me. It’s a big opportunity I just missed.
“[Healy] played a good move and surprised us a bit to go from the second group. I attacked where I initially planned to attack to try and win. Unfortunately there was one guy in front.”
Simmons’s move was always planned for the 27km mark, on a category-three climb – a point he thought would be “early enough”.
With 40km to go, however, Healy launched his own ambush, and left Simmons and Michael Storer (Tudor) in pursuit. The American proved the strongest of the two chasers, winning an uphill sprint to the line.
“I would have rather been doing this in the front,” he told Cycling Weekly. “Of course I’m disappointed. You don’t race for second. Tomorrow we’ll wake up and no one will even know I was second here. A stage win in this race can change your life – second place can’t.”
It wasn’t until recently that Simmons began looking at the road book for this Tour de France, careful not to jinx his chances of making the Lidl-Trek squad. He first studied the course in detail last week, and immediately liked the look of stage six in Normandy. “I put a little check mark next to the day,” he said.
“I thought the break would make it. I thought, if we raced hard in the start – like we did – it would be a group of strong guys.
“As a bunch, we can’t just let everyday be a sprint of a GC day, otherwise Pogi [Tadej Pogačar] will finish here with eight stages, the sprinters will have their say, then the two time trials – for the rest of the teams, what do we take away?”
On Thursday, Simmons’s take-away was second – his best result in three Tour starts, but a bittersweet one nonetheless.
Were there positives to be drawn out of the performance? “I was thinking, stage six of the Tour, I seem to like to hurt myself – it was also my first breakaway of my first Tour [in 2022] when Wout [van Aert] made me look like a junior. To be again off the front, and this time a little bit more racing than just hanging on, is nice… It’s better to suffer in the front than the back.”
The result also gave Simmons a deeper drive to keep chasing a victory. His last came at the Tour de Suisse three weeks ago; before that, he won the stars and stripes, a jersey that makes him stand out in the bunch – along with his technicolour sunglasses and ginger handlebar moustache.
“Of course we keep going,” he said. Decked in flair, and undeterred by a near miss, Simmons's confidence to attack is alive and well. “It’s three weeks, and historically – I don’t want to say for sure and jinx myself – but I typically get better in the second and third week when everyone’s a bit more tired.
“I hope we time the fitness right and that’s what happens again here.”
