On the Tour de France some victories can feel like an admission of defeat. The Polish climber Rafal Majka’s third Tour stage win of his young career here had that ring to it. Last year Majka landed two stages and a King of the Mountains jersey which were consolation prizes after his Tinkoff-Saxo team leader, Alberto Contador, crashed out of the race in the Vosges; here it was hard to avoid the sense that Tinkoff are already looking to salvage what they can after Contador’s poor showing at the first mountain-top stage finish at La Pierre-Saint-Martin.
Had Contador been in a position to challenge Chris Froome for the yellow jersey, it is unthinkable that his young team-mate would have been allowed to leave his side and make the running in the day’s escape among teams scrapping for the stage, before forging ahead alone for the victory, 1min ahead of Ireland’s Daniel Martin. But these are difficult times for the Russo-Danish squad in the lurid camouflage-fluo kit.
The team’s Spanish leader endured what his director sportif, Sean Yates, claimed was his “worst ever day on a Grand Tour” on Tuesday, his lieutenant Ivan Basso had surgery on Wednesday for testicular cancer and another mainstay, Daniele Bennati, abandoned en route to Cauterets with a suspected broken leg.
“It’s not easy for our team at the moment,” said Majka, who said this was a win for “morale” before adding the team have not entirely given up hope. “Alberto can get on the podium, maybe even win. I don’t think Chris Froome can be beaten but even the last day it can change. The Tour is still long and some guys can have a bad day.”
Hopes will stay alive until well into next week but the riders having a bad day in 30C (86F) heat over the Col du Tourmalet were mostly the same ones as the day before. The French trio of Romain Bardet, Thibaut Pinot and Jean-Christophe Péraud were obliterated again and the 2014 champion, Vincenzo Nibali, struggled on the third-category climb to the finish, which has a minor place in British cycling history as the location for Robert Millar’s third career stage win in 1989.
With the lengthy descent of the Tourmalet followed by flat valley roads before the finish climb, the probable scenario was a select group accompanying Froome and his team-mates, with their eyes more on getting through this stage intact before Thursday’s final panel in the Pyrenean triptych, a 195km run eastwards via two first-category ascents to the summit finish at Plateau de Beille, where it will become clear whether the race leader can be shaken.
After Nibali set his Astana team-mates to make the pace early on in the Tourmalet – somewhat over-optimistically as it turned out – it was Geraint Thomas and Richie Porte who took over on behalf of Froome, whittling the lead group down to just over a dozen by the summit and permitting it to swell gently to double that before they hit the Cauterets climb.
The only change was that Nibali slipped one place in the standings, with the Dutchman Bauke Mollema making a late attack to claim the Italian’s 10th place overall with the alacrity and purposefulness of a field mouse chasing a crumb under a picnic table.
Froome was at pains to underline that although this might have looked like a routine day at the office, it was given its own edge by the heat as well as the lingering effects of the intense push up to the summit at La Pierre-Saint-Martin the previous afternoon. Even the descents carried their dangers, with the Frenchman Warren Barguil, holding ninth overall, coming close to hitting a herd of cows as he sped down the Tourmalet in pursuit of Froome and the leaders, before twice coming close to a cropper as he zigzagged through the pack of cars and motorbikes behind the yellow-jersey group.
With three major climbs, the Plateau de Beille stage will be the setting for an intense battle for the King of the Mountains polka-dot jersey, currently held by Froome, and the ascent to the finish will show who is looking for the leftovers and who is still hungry for the main dish in this Tour.
Majka’s fellow escapees all belonged to teams in the former category: Cannondale-Garmin’s Martin, a pair from Pinot’s FDJ team, a habitue of this sort of move in the evergreen Thomas Voeckler, the German champion Emanuel Buchmann of Bora-Argon 18, and the former Sky domestique Serge Pauwels, now of the African squad MTN-Qhubeka.
The battle to establish the escape was intense because the teams have begun to sense there are opportunities for stage wins now the overall standings have taken some shape. Martin bridged to the escape after it had gone well clear, riding across a four-minute gap from the peloton, and he probably paid the price for the extra effort when he was unable to hold Majka and Pauwels on the Tourmalet.
The Irishman, winner of a Pyrenean stage in 2013, staged a strong comeback late in the stage to overtake Pauwels on the final climb, before claiming his second runner-up slot of this Tour after his second to Alexis Vuillermoz on Saturday at Mur de Bretagne.
He will be on the hunt again, and if Froome maintains his stranglehold the fight for consolation prizes will be intense.
1 R Majka (Pol) Tinkoff-Saxo 5hr 02min 01sec; 2 D Martin (Irl) C-Garmin +1:00; 3 E Buchmann (Ger) Bora-Argon 18 +1:23; 4 S Pauwels (Bel) MTN-Qhubeka +2:08; 5 T Voeckler (Fr) Europcar +3:34; 6 J Simon (Fr) Cofidis Solutions s/t; 7 B Mollema (Neth) Trek +5:11; 8 A Valverde (Sp) Movistar +5:19; 9 C Froome (GB) Team Sky +5:21; 10 A Contador (Sp) Tinkoff-Saxo s/t.
1 C Froome 41hr 03min 31sec; 2 T van Garderen (US) BMC +2:52; 3 N Quintana (Col) Movistar +3:09; 4 A Valverde +3:59; 5 G Thomas +4:03; 6 A Contador (Sp) +4:04; 7 T Gallopin (Fr) Lotto Soudal +4:33; 8 R Gesink (Neth) LottoNL-Jumbo +4:35; 9 W Barguil (Fr) Giant-Alpecin +6: 44; 10 B Mollema (Neth) Trek Factory +7:05; 11 V Nibali (It) Astana +7:47.
