Stage 18 top 10 results
Arnaud Demare shook off overnight insinuations of cheating (since retracted) from fellow rider Andre Greipel to win the stage for Groupama-FDJ.
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An anecdote from Sam Lister: “Earlier this year, while on a ride through South Wales, I had the good fortune to bump into Geraint Thomas at a set of traffic lights,” he says. “He was head to toe in his Team Sky kit and had those hideous sunnies on. My first reaction was to swear loudly in his face, which isn’t how you should greet a personal hero.”
No, it isn’t.
“Anyway, we got over that and then proceeded to ride together for the next 30 mins,” Sam continues. “|He actively encouraged it; I was trying to play it cool. We spoke mainly about Neil Warnock, but also how much he hates the diet he has to stick to. He was just a thoroughly lovely bloke. But a note of caution: I have a terrible record of people breaking bones on bikes shortly after riding with me. Needless to say, this Tour isn’t over yet.”
The top 10 on GC after stage 18
Geraint Thomas leads from Tom Dumoulin and Chris Froome with just one mountain stage (tomorrow), one time-trial (Saturday) and one procession into Paris (Sunday) to go. Judging by the comments of other riders in the peloton, Thomas will be a very popular winner, assuming he holds on. He’s one of those rare people nobody seems to have a bad word to say about. Nobody, that is, except me - he once stood me up for an interview on the Copcabana in Rio. Those were the days!!!
Geraint Thomas retains the yellow jersey: Ignoring all the fireworks exploding up at the front, the main GC riders finished safely down the field, so it’s as you were as far as that’s concerned.
Demare wins: Arnaud Demare wins the stage by half-a-bike-length from Christophe Laporte, who gestured angrily at the victor as they crossed the line. I’m not sure what his beef is, as it looked a fair contest. Alexander Kristoff was third in a fascinating sprint. The winning time: 3hr 46min 50sec.
ARNAUD DEMARE WINS THE STAGE!
The Groupama-FDJ rider gets a perfect lead-out to win stage 18.
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200m to go: Arnaud Demare goes for it!
2km to go: Sagan surfs from wheel to wheel, trying to decide which is the best one to latch on to. Alexander Kristoff is also near the front, looking for his lead-out man.
4km to go: Sagan drops back a bit, with three of his own teammates still leading the dash through Pau. Such are his improvisational skills, Sagan won’t need to rely on them for a lead-out, but their presence at the front to control the pace is a help.
4.5km to go: The road is wide and the riders of Bora Hansgrohe and Groupama-FDJ are at the front of the bunch, occupying one half of it.
6km to go: Bora Hansgrohe’s train lines up at the front of the bunch, their riders shovelling coal into the furnace as the stage approaches its knockings. Peter Sagan is third or fourth from the front and has a long look over his right shoulder.
9km to go: As if by magic and on cue, Bora Hansgrohe’s riders move to the front of the bunch on the wide road into Pau. They’\re going at a ferocious lick and the peloton is really strung out.
14 km to go: Groupama-FDJ continue to drag the bunch along, while Cofidis move towards the front to get Christopher Laporte into position. UAE Team Emirates rider Alexander Kristoff will be another fancying his chances today, while Peter Sagan can’t be ruled out either despite his crash yesterday. His Bora Hansgrohe team-mates have done no work today, while the rider played down his chances before the start of the stage. A cynic might suggest that’s a massive bluff on their part.
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16km to go: The peloton reforms, but is strung out like the washing on a clothes line. In their livery of red, white and blue, the riders of Groupama-FDJ put the hammer down at the front of the bunch as they begin the process of setting things up for their sprinter, Arnaud Demare.
16km to go: There’s a small split in the peloton, with a group of 12 riders putting a few seconds between them and the rest of the pack.
18km to go: The field tackle the second and final speed-bump of the day, the Cat 4 Cote d’Anos. It marks the end of the breakaway, but hats off to Luke Durbridge (Mitchelton-Scott), Thomas Boudat (Direct Energie), Matt Hayman (Mitchelton-Scott) , Niki Terpstra (Quick-Step) and Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Wonty-Groupe Gobert) for a courageous day’s work.
20km to go: As we approach the business end of the race, the riders are getting their game faces on, as are the Guardian readers and their commentator. The final word on Team Sky today goes to Colum, who has this to say ...
“Domination of any sport by one team does breed contempt, right enough,” he says. “Some/many people came to dislike Barcelona’s football because it won so consistently, even if it was wonderful to watch.
“The Sky cycling team become like automatons simply because they are so good. Hence we want to denigrate them. Add to that the significantly unlikeable Brailsford and his holier-than-thou attitude.
“But they are relatively new to cycling, so how come they have ‘superior training methods’? And money alone does not make a good team as football has shown us, so maybe the secret ingredient is actually Brailsford himself. So we are stuck between admiring and hating them because of their abilities. A bit like Mourinho and Man Utd?”
I think there’s more than an enough in that very considered mail to enrage people on both sides of the Sky fence!
27km to go: The gap is under a minute for the first time in a while. Just 46 seconds worth of road separate the five-man breakaway from the peloton.
34km to go: In the breakaway, duties are being shared on a fairly equal basis. Niki Terpstra seems to be doing more than his fair share on the front, but is currently having a breather as fifth man. The gap is down to 1min 06sec.
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35km to go: The peloton is travelling at an average speed of 43.71 kilometres per hour, but Adam Hirst wishes they’d speed things up a bit. “Today is the reason that TV coverage used to be limited to the last couple of hours,” he says. “Will it ever end?”
An email from Daryl: “Perhaps someone can explain why other teams can’t just decide themselves to increase the speed of the peloton?” he writes. “Surely the only thing that other teams can’t do is slow the peloton down, but they are perfectly capable of increasing it? Is this actually a genuine problem of Sky controlling the pace all the time, or more of a case that the other teams are happy to let Sky do the majority of the hard graft at the front?”
As far as I know, the problem is that the peloton often goes so fast at Sky’s behest, that other teams struggle just to keep up and ramping up the speed is out of the question. What wit5h their big budgets and apparently superior training methods, Sky have way more strength in depth than other teams and can therefore take a stranglehold on Grand Tours which most cycling fans consider very boring. They are, of course, under no obligation to entertain.
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42km to go: The gap is 1min 13sec as the peloton keep tabs on the five-man breakaway. The camera cuts to Direct Energie rider Thomas Boudet taking a “sticky bottle” from his team car. It only takes five seconds or so for it to change hands, which means there isn’t that much glue on it. Maybe they’re running out at this late stage of the Tour.
48km to go: Five-man breakaway ... 1min 20sec ... peloton. With so little going on out on the road, the French TV producer is letting his imagination run wild, now treating viewers to a series of slow, moody close-ups of Luke Durbridge looking pensive in the five-man escape party.
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56km to go: Flanked by cornfields, the riders roll along at a leisurely pace with the gap between the five-man breakaway and the peloton at 1min 10sec.
There is so little going on that Eurosport have just cut to a lengthy feature about the various hairstyles sported by some riders in the peloton. That scratching sound you can hear is that of a barrel being scraped with just three days of the Tour remaining. I’m going to pull in to the side of the road for a quick comfort break, but will be back in five minutes. Seeing as we were talking about bidons, learn how to drink from one while I’m away ...
59km to go: AG2R rider Pierre Latour, wearing the white jersey for best young rider, drops out of the peloton and goes back to his team car to pick up some water-bottles and energy gels. He doesn’t over-burden himself – I’m told the record number of full bidons carried by one rider to distribute among his team-mates is 16. Travelling back to and through the peloton to give them out to various team-mates must be seriously energy-sapping.
Nancy Karrer has a question: “Sorry but what does ‘skybot’ mean?” she asks. “It keeps coming up. What does it mean?”
I believe, Nancy, that it’s a derogatory reference to the apparently tireless line of Sky riders that can invariably be found controlling the pace at the front of the peloton. Fans of Team Sky, an alarming number of whom can be precious, humourless and over-sensitive bunch, really don’t like it. Hence it’s almost constant use across myriad media platforms by people who enjoy winding them up.
Michael Evans writes: “I had previously read that race organizers designate feed zones and those typically include ‘green’ areas before and after the feed zone, so racers have a specific area to toss empty bottles/trash prior to and following the feed,” he writes, making a hell of a lot of sense. “The goal is to minimize the areas where discarded items and associated chaos could cause a crash and also to aid in clean-up of said discarded items that are not sought after by fans (wrappers, etc.).”
63km to go: Luke Durbridge (Mitchelton-Scott), Thomas Boudat (Direct Energie), Matt Hayman (Mitchelton-Scott) , Niki Terpstra (Quick-Step) and Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Wonty-Groupe Gobert) are in the breakaway and have been almost since the gun. The gap between them and the peloton is at 1min 21sec. Cofidis rider Anthony Perez is towing the bunch along as not very much continues to happen at great length.
More on depression in the peloton: “Further to Stefan Volkmann’s message regarding mental health in the peloton, it’s worth checking out Molly Weaver’s upfront and brutally honest account of her battle with depression,” writes Alan Mackie. “Might be of interest to folks if they haven’t seen it.” Good shout, Alan - I remember reading this when it was published originally.
Marcus has a question: “You’ve mentioned several times Team Sky taking food and drink outside of the feedzone,” he says. “If this is allowed, then what purpose do the actual feed zones serve? Are they just recommendations so fans can potentially get some souvenirs?”
Yep, Marcus has a question and it’s a very good one that I can’t answer. Designated feedzones are famously chaotic, so it would make sense for them to be in different places. Anyone know why that isn’t the case? Here’s some info on feedzones, from the people at the Global Cycling Network.
76km to go: It’s more or less as you were, with the gap between the five-man breakaway and the peloton at around 1min 30sec. Nairo Quintana has changed his shirt. The riders are approaching Duhort-Bachen, where an artistic helicopter cameraman, who is possibly auditioning for a job on the next David Attenborough nature extravaganza is treating TV viewers to footage of a very nice chateau followed by some sweeping panoramic vistas from overhead.
Here we go: In this report, which requires me to let readers know what is going on in the race, however uneventful it may be on a day like today, I recently reported that the riders of Team Sky had taken on food and drink outside of the feed zone, as they are entitled to do.
This, from Charles: “Should you not be providing unbiased commentary on the current stage?” he asks. “The continual ‘skybot’ mantra is both boring and getting rather tiresome and ironically is alienating the people viewing said commentary. Get a grip.”
While I applaud Charles for (a) having as firm a grasp of irony as Alanis Morisette and (b) for his apparent success in being appointed spokesman for all our readers at some meeting to which I wasn’t invited, I’m struggling to figure out how reporting the controversial news that ‘some men have been given food before any other men were given food’ is in any way biased.
News, as we get it from Charles, on whether reporting that Nairo Quintana has a sore arm is against the spirit of kilometre-by-kilometre cycling commentary.
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More on Peter Kennaugh and his mojo: “I read an interesting piece on him in Cycling Weekly before the Dauphine carrying quotes which suggested that his lack of early season racing this year was down to mental health issues preventing him from training,” writes Stefan Volkmann. “Fair play to him for being upfront with his problems if so - haven’t seen any other pro being as honest in a sport which places huge demands on the athletes mentally as well as physically.”
90km to go: Stuyven and Vanmarcke have been reeled back in by the peloton, leaving the original five out in front with an advantage of two minutes.
97km to go: Trek-Segafredo’s Michael Gogl aborts his attempt to catch the five-man breakaway and leaves Stuyven and Vanmarcke to it. Way back in the field, Nairo Quintana is being paced back to the bunch with what looks like a very nasty injury to his left elbow.
100km to go: Michael Gogl (Trek-Segafredo), Jasper Stuyven (Trek-Segafredo) and Sep Vanmarcke (EF Education First–Drapac p/b Cannondale) are the trio who jumped off the front of the bunch, upsetting my plans to get away from this keyboard for five minutes. The gap between the five-man breakaway and the yellow jersey group is 52 seconds and they’re in no-man’s land somewhere in between.
104km to go: There’s a crash in the peloton, with several riders hitting the deck. Nairo Quintana comes out worst and needs mechanical assistance for his bike and medical assistance for a wound on his left shoulder. He’s riding alongside the doctor getting that seen too and is over a minute behind the peloton.
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105km to go: There’s been an attack off the front of the peloton, with a couple of Trek-Segafredo riders and somebody from the ridiculously unwieldy EF Education First–Drapac p/b Cannondale having broken off the front.
An email from Jonathan Taylor: “I was watching the coverage on ITV earlier on in the tour when Peter Kennaugh was being interviewed he said his big problem at Sky – and possibly why he has struggled since leaving – was that he was turning up to pre-season a bit unfit and= overweight while the likes of Thomas and Froome were all set and ready to go,” he says.
“So while the others were improving he was playing catch up. He also said that Sky were doing a ferocious amount of roadwork in training – more than he is currently doing, so if his levels of training are down it would make sense that his form and that of the others have dropped away.”
110km to go: The gap is down to 1min 21sec, but the five men in the breakaway and the 141 men chasing them all seem happy enough. It’s a transition stage, one of those days and nothing much is happening. All involved have gone over the Cat 4 Cote de Madiran, one of two speed-bumps that need to be negotiated today.
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An email: “Skybots function as a collective, as long as they don’t become self-aware,” says Hugo Malan, who should probably don his tin hat.
116km to go: The gap from the breakaway to the bunch is 1min 30sec. The five men in the breakaway are: Luke Durbridge (Mitchelton-Scott), Thomas Boudat (Direct Energie), Matt Hayman (Mitchelton-Scott) , Niki Terpstra (Quick-Step) and Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Wonty-Groupe Gobert).
The peloton, which is being led by Alexander Kristoff’s UAE-Team Emirates and back in the bunch the riders of Team Sky have just taken musettes full of goodies and bidons of refreshing libation outside the feed zone ... as is their inalienable right.
An email from Eduoard Guidon: “At risk of eliciting the ire of those who object to your use of the term ‘Skybots’, I’ve been pondering the extent to which we might be glossing over the fact that Team Sky’s approach to winning grand tours is as much about taking very good riders and making them winners, as it is about signing winners and assuming that that will be enough,” he says.
“I’m thinking in particular of what happened next to Froome’s recent lieutenants. There’s Richie Porte, who is obviously extremely talented, but for whom you have to suspect that his persistent failure in GCs has as much to do with his ability as it does his bad luck. Mikel Landa is also very good, but clearly not good enough to even be his team’s leader. Obviously this could be down to proprietary training methods/medical support/nutrition/doping, but could it just be that it’s also partly the triumph of the collective, which has its own merits?”
While he may not have been a lieutenant, specifically, you can probably Peter Kennaugh to that list of riders whose mojo has mysteriously deserted them, for whatever reason, since leaving Team Sky.
127km to go: UAE Team Emirates rider Darwin Atapuma is doing the heavy lifting at the front of the peloton as they keep the gap between themselves and the five-man breakaway at a steady 1min 30sec. Atapuma is a team-mate of Alexander Kristoff, the Norweigian sprinter who’ll have his beady eye on today’s stage.
136km to go: Our leading quintet are 1min 26sec clear of the posse and may stay clear. It’s a strong group and with so many big-name sprinters already out of the race, quite a few of teams have no real motivation to reel in the escapees. Andre Greipel is gone. Dylan Groenewegen is gone. Fernando Gaviria is gone. Marcel Kittel is gone. Mark Cavendish is gone. Michael Matthews is gone. So who’s left? Well, Alexander Kristoff and Arnaud Demare will both fancy their chances and you can never rule out Peter Sagan.
141km to go: The gap, by the way, is 1min 39sec.
142km to go: Arnaud Demare’s Groupama-FDJ team-mates are positioned on the front of the peloton, while the riders of Direct Energie are behind them.
The peloton have given up their chase: There are going to be a lot of very, very angry directeurs sportifs in various team cars on the road to Pau. The bunch have decided to stop chasing the five-man escape party and left them to their own devices.
Chapeau to Luke Durbridge (Mitchelton-Scott), Thomas Boudat (Direct Energie), Matt Hayman (Mitchelton-Scott) , Niki Terpstra (Quick-Step) and Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Wonty-Groupe Gobert), for it is they.
More on Peter Sagan v L’Asphalt: Earlier, I asked why the Bora Hansgrohe rider was needlessly risking life and limb on an apparently crazy descent when he didn’t need to, what with him having secured the green jersey already, as long as he finishes the race in Paris on Sunday.
Gary Naylor has an answer: “Because he’s Peter Sagan,” he says. “Grim professionalism has triumphed in most sports (blame the computers, the sports psychologists, the earpieces, whatever) which makes Sagan is a rare beast indeed - a genuine maverick and a genuine winner. Of course he was racing when he didn’t need to - it’s what he does.”
More on Chris Froome v Le Gendarmerie: Chris Froome said a “misunderstanding” led to a police officer knocking him off his bike after stage 17 of the Tour de France on Wednesday.
Pictures emerged after the stage of Froome - wearing a grey jacket over his race jersey - responding angrily after the police officer tried to grab him as he was rolling back from the summit finish on the Col du Portet in the direction of the Team Sky bus.
“I was the first rider to come down the descent and one of the gendarmes grabbed my arm as I was passing,” Froome said.
“Obviously he thought I was a spectator going down the race route or something so he grabbed me. I was going at some speed so I came off obviously, but it was just a misunderstanding.”
151km to go: Our five-man breakaway is still clear of the peloton, but the gap is only 18 seconds. On ITV, Ned Boulting and David Millar are discussing the fact that, because there are so few opportunities to win stages left, lots of teams will have been warned on pain of death not to miss today’s breakaway. And then, five minutes into the start of racing, they’ve missed the breakaway. At the moment, various directeurs sportifs will be roaring in their riders’ ears over the radio, effing and jeffing and ordering them to bridge the gap between the peloton and the breakaway.
An email from Matt Turland: “Afternoon Barry, afternoon all,” he says. “Always makes me laugh when a stage is described as ‘flat’ and still manages to squeeze in what must amount to nearly 1k in climbing? Admittedly, these gents are thoroughbreds and this will be a bit of a stroll for most of them but it certainly doesn’t make me feel much better about myself and my cycling habits. Anyway, unless Sagan is still sporting injuries, it surely has to be him or a member of the breakaway who take the spoils today?”
Well, the early indications are that Mr Demare and his team-mates have their eye on this one.
An interesting story about Arnaud Demare: The Frenchman was dropped on the first climb yesterday and rode most of the stage alone, but finished comfortably inside the time limit. Afterwards, Andre Greipel, who is out of the race and watching at home in Germany, posted a tweet insinuating that Demare had taken illegal tows off cars while negotiating yesterday’s climbs (something the Frenchman has been accused of doing before). The tweet has since been deleted, but you can see it here ...
André Greipel apologises for insinuating that Arnaud Démare held on to cars to make the time cut at Tour de France | https://t.co/Upo4tig4cX #TdF2018 pic.twitter.com/oeRgvOXPVF
— Cycling Weekly (@cyclingweekly) July 26, 2018
Demare was most indignant at Greipel’s tweet and responded in no uncertain terms.
Glad to know you don't respect me as much as I respect you. I thought you were smarter. There are jury members everywhere at all times. I'm sending you my files. Given that you are an expert, let's see what you think about it.
— Arnaud Demare (@ArnaudDemare) July 25, 2018
Greipel subsequently deleted his tweet and apologised. Something he did last year too, after accusing Peter Sagan of “shenanigans” in a crash that ended Mark Cavendish’s Tour de France. Greipel is one of the peloton’s good guys, in my humble opinion, but he seems to have jumped the gun yesterday.
My apology go out to @ArnaudDemare and @GroupamaFDJ as I have had not the right to make that tweet based on GPS time, which can be wrong, plus I got the incorrect times he lost on the last hill. I’m sorry. Lesson learned: don’t tweet about sth you are not part off.
— Andre Greipel (@AndreGreipel) July 26, 2018
You can read the whole story here, courtesy of the good people at Cycling Weekly.
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162km to go: Luke Durbridge (Mitchelton-Scott), Thomas Boudat (Direct Energie), Matt Hayman (Mitchelton-Scott) , Niki Terpstra (Quick-Step) and Guillaume Van Keirsbulck (Wonty-Groupe Gobert) have gone clear of the bunch, where the riders of French sprinter Arnaud Demare’s Groupama-FDJ team are trying to close down any counter-attacks from riders trying to get across to join the quintet.
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No further withdrawals today: The 146 riders who began yesterday’s stage all reported for duty this morning and are about to start racing. Monsieur Prudhomme waves his flag and riders from Mitchelton-Scott, Quick-Step and Wanty-Groupe Gobert attack immediately.
Today’s roll-out has begun: The peloton is cruising out of Trie sur Baise, with the riders waiting for race director Christian Prudhomme to give them the signal to start racing.
Whither Peter Sagan?
Although it doesn’t appear to have been caught on camera, Peter Sagan suffered a heavy fall during one of yesterday’s descents and rolled over the finish line looking very sorry for himself, with his shirt and shorts shredded, bleeding from several cuts. He is, however fit to start today although he did report this morning that he is very sore. Sagan is guaranteed to win a record-equalling sixth green jersey in this year’s Tour if he finishes the race in Paris on Sunday. Quite why he was risking life and limb on an apparently crazy descent that was completely unnecessary is anyone’s guess.
Thanks everybody for your support and messages! That was a hard crash but, fortunately, I haven't broken anything and I feel confident about the last four stages of @LeTour (@bettiniphoto) pic.twitter.com/9VuYYmFl0W
— Peter Sagan (@petosagan) July 25, 2018
Sprinters back on top? Here are the favourites for stage 18 according to #TDF2018 journalists covering the race on the ground pic.twitter.com/eBsVSVuMXV
— letourdata (@letourdata) July 26, 2018
Brailsford apologises for insulting the French
Sky’s general manager, David Brailsford, has said sorry for ill-advised comments he made earlier this week suggesting that spitting at riders was “a French cultural thing”. Jeremy Whittle reports ...
Sky's leadership dilemma resolved
Jeremy Whittle on a bad day for Chris Froome, who had problems with his rivals on the way up yesterday’s final climb and problems with a policemen on his way back down once the stage was over.
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Nairo Quintana wins stage 17
Sean Ingle was in Saint-Lary-Soulan to see Nairo Quintana win his first stage of this year’s Tour, while Geraint Thomas tightened his hold on the yellow jersey.
The top 10 on GC after stage 17
Geraint Thomas extended his lead on his main rivals yesterday, while his Sky team-mate Chris Froome dropped from second on GC to third. Team Sunweb’s Tom Dumoulin takes over in second, while Team LottoNL-Jumbo’s Primoz Roglic will still be harbouring hopes of muscling his way on to the podium before Sunday’s procession to Paris.
Stage 18: Trie sur Baise-Pau (171km)
William Fotheringham’s stage-by-stage guide: An abrupt transition to flat roads could offer an intriguing diversion from the main plot; a similar stage in 2012 witnessed a desperate contest to get in the early break, which fought out the finish. This is the last chance for any non-climbers to try for the stage win – Edvald Boasson Hagen for example – and the sprinters’ teams may not be in sufficient shape to pull a group back.
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