Right then. I understand another significant sporting event is about to begin, so I will shuffle off. Tomorrow sees the first time trial: here’s Will Fotheringham’s preview. Bye!
Stage five, Wednesday 30 June, individual time trial, Changé – Laval 27.2km
A first proper sort-out with a time trial long enough to create gaps but short enough that they shouldn’t be definitive. It’s a classic rolling course, climbing from the start and again towards the finish, an initial chance to assess 2021 winner Tadej Pogacar, runner-up Primoz Roglic, and 2018 winner Geraint Thomas, while short enough to suit Alaphilippe. It also suits specialists such as Belgian Victor Campenaerts and Swiss rider Stefan Küng. This stage is in the Mayenne, home turf of Küng’s FDJ manager Marc Madiot, so he knows what he has to do: win.
The general classification after stage four
- Mathieu van der Poel (NED) Alpecin - Fenix 16:19:10
- Julian Alaphilippe (FRA) Deceuninck - Quick-Step +8
- Richard Carapaz (ECU) INEOS Grenadiers +31
- Wout van Aert (BEL) Jumbo - Visma +31
- Wilco Kelderman (NED) BORA - hansgrohe +38
- Tadej Pogacar (SLO) UAE Team Emirates +39
- Enric Mas (ESP) Movistar Team +40
- Nairo Quintana (COL) Team Arkéa - Samsic +40
- Pierre Latour (FRA) TotalEnergies +45
- David Gaudu (FRA) Groupama - FDJ +52
Bloody hell, he's done it!!!!@MarkCavendish wins stage 4 of the #TDF2021!!!
— Deceuninck-QuickStep (@deceuninck_qst) June 29, 2021
Photo: @GettySport pic.twitter.com/7I9GLeK5n8
Updated
Here’s that post-race interview. The immediate post-event interview, either in triumph or despair, is rarely very revealing, but sometimes all you need is a sense of the emotion:
"I don't know what to say man"
— Tour de France™ (@LeTour) June 29, 2021
First words from the 🇮🇲 Manx Missile, fresh from a 31st stage win. @MarkCavendish#TDF2021 pic.twitter.com/9tMygrixNA
Jeremy Whittle has filed his report on the stage:
Mark Cavendish capped a dramatic and emotional return to the Tour de France by winning stage four from Redon to Fougères, ahead of a clutch of the Tour’s finest young sprinters, to take his 31st career stage win in the French race.
A last minute stand-in for his Deceuninck QuickStep team’s Irish sprinter Sam Bennett, 36 year old Cavendish was back to his very best and justified the faith show in him by team manager Patrick Lefevere. After jubilantly crossing the line, a sobbing Cavendish hugged his team mates and many of his peers.
“I don’t know what to say,” said Cavendish, almost breaking into tears, afterwards. “Just being here is special enough. I didn’t know I would get to come back to this race. I thought I was never coming back [here] honestly but the stars have aligned somehow. After last year it’s just nice to have some good luck.
“We didn’t know we were going to get there but we just see what a team this is. So many people didn’t believe in me but these guys do.”
Much more here:
Here’s Will Fotheringham’s immediate reaction to Mark Cavendish’s 31st Tour de France stage win:
The way Cav went through the “mouse hole” between Van Moer and Bol. The mark of a great who is back to his best. Who’d have expected this last November?
— William Fotheringham (@willfoth) June 29, 2021
And taking the slightly longer route around Philipsen who had the inside of the curve
— William Fotheringham (@willfoth) June 29, 2021
Still panting and struggling to speak through his emotions, Cavendish gave a brief post-race interview:
I don’t know what to say, man. Just being here is special enough. I didn’t think I’d ever get to come back to this race. Just fire, fire from the whole team. You’ve got the green jersey, the world champion, Julian Alaphilippe, putting everything in. So many people don’t believe in me, you know, and these guys do. When you come to Deceuninck-QuickStep, you’ve got the best riders in the world, you know. I never, ever want bad things to happen to other people, but after the last year it’s just nice to have some good luck, you know, for myself.
It’s worth re-reading this article in the light of this stage victory. Sample quote:
It’s already a dream to be at the Tour de France. If I’d sat here a year ago and thought I’d be in this spot … I have some self-belief but even that I probably wouldn’t have believed. I haven’t specifically prepared for the Tour de France but I know I’ve got good condition. I’ve beaten the majority of the sprinters who are here, a week ago, so that gives me confidence.
Here’s a replay of the denouement, with Van Moer getting gobbled up in the early stages, and Cavendish powering through to claim the win:
Let's watch that one again 🔁
— ITV Cycling (@itvcycling) June 29, 2021
Amazing. #TDF2021 pic.twitter.com/xFwtXB15Lp
Cavendish is in tears, accepting hugs from anyone nearby. The first five over the line were as follows:
- Mark Cavendish
- Nacer Bouhanni
- Jasper Philipsen
- Michael Matthews
- Peter Sagan
Updated
Mark Cavendish wins Stage Four of the 2021 Tour de France
Mark Cavendish comes through to win it! A brilliant, emotional victory for the Manx master!
Updated
1km to go: Van Moer isn’t going to make it. Cavendish is well placed...
1.5km to go: Van Moer looks completely knackered.
2km to go: Van Moer leads by 23sec. Various Israel Start-Up Nation riders lead the peloton.
3km to go: Van Moer’s lead is shrinking fast now. He leads by 33sec.
4km to go: Van Moer’s one significant previous stage win was on this year’s Critérium du Dauphiné, a solo breakaway triumph. Here’s a report. He leads by 41sec.
5km to go: Van Moer leads by 51sec.
6km to go: Van Moer’s lead has started to shrink, as it inevitably would. It’s down under a minute now, to 54sec.
7km to go: Van Moer’s lead is still 1min 4sec. Finally there are some riders at the front of the peloton who look vaguely interested in this race, with a couple of TotalEnergies jerseys to the fore.
8km to go: Van Moer might just do this. He leads by 1min 4sec.
9km to go: Another kilometre gone, and Van Moer leads by 1min 6sec.
10km to go: Brent van Moer is going it alone, and he’s stretching his lead! He’s 1min 3sec ahead of the pack, and they’re running out of road if they want to catch him.
15km to go: They’ve just gone through Dompierre-du-Chemin, a small town of some 544 inhabitants. Its claim to fame is as the site of the death in 1799 of Jean-Baptiste Le Dauphin, commonly known as Le Vengeur, the avenger. It’s a hell of a name. His demise sounds appropriately grisly.
17km to go: The leaders’ lead is down to 43sec. Here’s a quick reminder of what happened when a stage ended in Fougères in 2015:
23km to go: Here’s Mark Cavendish’s successful sprint for third place in the intermediate sprint:
💚 @MarkCavendish takes 3rd place at the intermediate sprint and scores 15 points in the green jersey classification.
— Tour de France™ (@LeTour) June 29, 2021
💚 @MarkCavendish prend la 3ème place au sprint intermédiaire et marque 15 points au classement du maillot vert. Affaire à suivre !#TDF2021 pic.twitter.com/T4xgLAlCRH
26km to go: Looks like Groupama-FDJ and Education-Nippo are in control of the the head of the peloton. The front two lead by 1min 20sec.
30km to go: Mark Cavendish was next over the line, and the sprint points distribution is as follows:
- Brent Van Moer, 20 pts
- Pierre-Luc Périchon, 17 pts
- Cavendish, 15 pts
- Morkov, 13 pts
- Bouhanni, 11 pts
- Matthews, 10 pts
- Greipel, 9 pts
- Sagan, 8 pts
- Colbrelli, 7 pts
- Coquard, 6 pts
- Démare, 5 pts
- Swift, 4 pts
- Mezgec, 3 pts
- Alaphilippe, 2 pts
- Guarnieri, 1 pt
36km to go: Brent Van Moer wins the race very comfortably, with Pierre-Luic Périchon trailing.
37km to go: The leaders are 1km away from the finish line of the intermediate sprint, and nobody’s catching them before they get there.
38km to go: The leaders’ lead is down to 1min 20sec, and shrinking fast.
43km to go: No such trouble for Vitré, site of today’s intermediate sprint in about 6km. One of its main claims to fame is a mention in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where it is lauded as “one of the few Gothic towns still left entire, complete, homogeneous”. It is twinned with Lymington in Hampshire, and with Greece - not the European country, the town in Monroe County, New York.
52km to go: I have really looked for something interesting to say about La Bouëxière. Really I have. I have failed. They passed it 5km ago, and I’m empty-handed.
58km to go: The front two still lead by a little under two minutes, and James Cavell’s emailed again. “Bikenut is right to assign some blame to DSs,” he writes, “but telling them to slow down will never work (opportunists will attack) and a slower peloton is often more dangerous, as more riders move to the front. Congestion increases as the bunch slows. When I was racing, a peloton felt safer when one or two teams were keeping the speed high enough to stop the front becoming congested, but not so fast that guys were falling in corners. A sort of ‘skinny diamond’ shape felt the best. Moments when the speed suddenly dropped were scary, as riders would move up around the edges, using verges and pavements if necessary.”
69km to go: The leaders will soon reach Liffré, which sounds like a portmanteau for Labi Siffre. Why you’d want to combine the words Labbi and Siffre I’m not sure. I suppose it’s like Bennifer, or Brangelina, though a close relationship between Labi and Siffre can probably be assumed, being as they are the same person. Anyway, is this the best Liffre song?
75km to go: Speed is increasing, and the leaders’ lead is decreasing: down now to 1min 35sec.
92km to go: The leaders have now passed Janzé, home of the Janzé Black Chicken, which has IGP status. It ranks No2 in the list of Breton animals published by the Rennes tourist office, behind the Coucou de Rennes chicken, “a delicious free-range chicken with a delicious nutty taste”. Apparently the Janze black is particularly good at gobbling up problem insects, including the Asian hornets that blight Le Sel-de-Bretagne. It’s not an entirely chicken-focused list: the No3 animal is a horse, No4 is a cow, while there’s a goat at No5, a sheep at No6 and a pig at No7.
“I think the DSs have to take responsibility for yesterday’s carnage,” says someone who styles himself Bikenut. “It’s no good saying the race organisers have to take the rap. The DS tells the team what to do; if they said slow the race down because I don’t want any of you to get hurt then the race would slow down. If they are saying push push push when the roads don’t allow it then crashes will happen. I think it’s appalling they are trying to blame someone else. They are the ones controlling the way the race is ridden. I agree with the earlier comments about every domestique trying to be with their leader. I also think it’s totally counter productive to have every GC team trying to get to the front in the final so they’re ‘safe’ until 3km. Why? It creates crashes, and again the DS is to blame.”
100km to go: We are a third of the way through today’s stage. It has not been enormously dramatic thus far, which given yesterday’s chaos isn’t entirely unwelcome. There is an intermediate sprint 36km from the finish, and when they are approaching that things might start to get a little spicy.
Updated
110km to go: A couple of responses to James Cavell’s email (scroll down a bit) as Périchon and Van Moer continue at the front with a lead just short of three minutes:
“James Cavell speaks sense,” says Guy Hornsby. “It feels so congested at the front in days like this. Once one team is all up there it’s all in, so it’s no surprise crashes happen. But yesterday was brutal. Some of the roads seemed dicing with danger. The riders should call it out.”
“I agree it’s largely the GC teams massing near the front since the 3km rule but teams en bloc riding is also due to having the DS yelling over the radio every 2 mins to get to the front,” writes Jonathan Martin. “Getting rid of radios will give safer, less formulaic races.”
115km to go: The front pair lead by nearly three minutes. Le Sel-de-Bretagne, which is just a few kilometres away now, is home to the Musee Eugene Aulnette, which “pays homage to a local historical figure who was a multi-faceted sculptor and an environmentally-friendly pioneer.” The town’s website also has a page about “the fight against the Asian hornet”.
126km to go: The peloton aren’t even slightly bothered about the two-man breakaway, which now leads by 2min 30sec.
135km to go: Pierre-Luic Périchon has joined Van Moer at the front, and the pair of them have headed off on their own.
139km to go: The stage has finally got under way. Brent van Moer of Lotto Soudal is the early leader.
143km to go: Still waiting for a race to break out. Consensus seems to be that the protest was a bit rubbish, because it wasn’t led by the right people and didn’t appear to be enthusiastically backed by all the riders. However, rider safety is very much the subject du jour. Talking of which, here’s an email from James Cavell:
Riders, especially the GC riders, often complain that too many riders are trying to ride at the front. They suggest that too many guys are ‘fresh’ and looking for a good GC position, but from my vantage point most of the riders at the front seem to be the entire squads of the top GC teams.
Why exactly do the likes of Thomas and Roglic need their entire squads riding shotgun to keep them out of trouble? If every GC team does the same, congestion remains a dangerous issue. Then, when the sprint trains try to bring up the fastmen, the front of the race seems to become the most dangerous place.
Is it not an option for the protected riders to be helped to stay at the front by fewer domestiques? (Shameless self promotion upcoming) I rode a season or two at elite category in the Low Countries and plenty of strong riders were adept at keeping up at the front without an entire team to protect them. Some were able to work alone, with domestiques such as myself lagging well behind.
Contrary to recent Tours, the front was by far the safest place to ride, although I rarely experienced the pointy end myself!
148km to go: Greipel remains at the front of the peloton, controlling it’s speed. Which is slow.
At KM 0 of today’s stage of the Tour de France, riders paused in solidarity as part of their calls for UCI to set up discussions to adapt the 3 km rule during stage races. #SafetyFirst #StrongerTogether
— CPA Cycling (@cpacycling) June 29, 2021
149.3km t0 g0: After a couple of minutes, they are back under way.
Tour halted in rider protest
149.5km to go: Andre Greipel manoeuvres himself to the front of the peloton, and makes sure everybody stops, and stop they do.
Updated
The rollout is well under way, and now just a kilometre or so from the official start.
The last big event that happened in Redon, just a couple of weeks back, was not so welcome:
A protest has apparently been planned for the start of today’s stage: word is that at the start of the stage proper riders will briefly dismount, and will then ride the first 10km of the stage at a deliberately slow pace. We’ll see what actually happens when it actually happens.
The CPA, aka Cyclistes Professionnels Associés, the professional cyclists’ union, has issued the following statement about yesterday’s carnage:
Following the crashes during the third stage of the Tour de France, the riders have been discussing how they wish to proceed to show their dissatisfaction with safety measures in place and demand their concerns are taken seriously. Their frustration about foreseeable and preventable action is enormous.
The riders wish to stress their respect for their sponsors, their sports groups, the organiser, their international institution. Supporters are very important to them – and this is why they will be riding today.
In return, the riders of the Tour de France ask for the same respect – respect for their safety.
For this reason they are asking the UCI to set up discussions with all race stakeholders to adapt the 3 km rule during stage races. This could avoid circumstances such as those which occurred in yesterday’s stage.
Through this course of action, the riders intend to show their understanding to all parties and to open up to a constructive dialogue rather than create difficulties for cycling and the fans. However, riders and CPA are determined to pursue changes for the safety and physical integrity of athletes. These changes are more necessary than ever.
This is Fougères, the ludicrously picturesque Brittany town where today’s stage ends. Redon, where it starts, is smaller and less touristed but the town centre looks lovely, with a canal running through it - the town has a museum, the Musee de la Batellerie, dedicated to its place in the nation’s canal system.
Here’s Jeremy Whittle’s report on yesterday’s stage three, when “all hell broke loose”:
All hell broke loose in the Tour de France as overall favourites and sprint contenders both hit the tarmac in a chaotic climax to the third stage, won in Pontivy by Tim Merlier, a fast-rising Belgian sprinter.
The defending champion, Tadej Pogacar, the 2018 winner, Geraint Thomas, the 2020 runner-up, Primoz Roglic, the Australian star Jack Haig and the sprinters Caleb Ewan, Peter Sagan and Arnaud Démare were among the many high-profile casualties on a day when the peloton tackled narrow winding roads on the fast approach to the finish.
As the 183km stage was won by Merlier of Alpecin-Fenix, a teammate to the overall race leader, Mathieu van der Poel, Sagan and Ewan crashed hard on the final bend with the stricken Australian sprinter lying on the tarmac as others rode around him. Ewan, winner of five stages in past Tours, was later forced to abandon the race with a broken collarbone.
Much more here:
Hello world!
The Tour puts yesterday’s “deplorable” unintended chaos behind it with a stage that might just induce some admirable, predictable chaos. It’s the third shortest full stage of this year’s tour, and while the two shorter both have hors catégorie climbs, this one is flatter than the critical reception for The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. Here’s what Will Fotheringham had to say about it in his full print-out-and-keep guide to this season’s Tour:
Stage four, Redon – Fougères 150.4km
The race ventures towards Normandy but stops just short of the border at another town with cycling history, home of the late Albert Bouvet, the legendary “Bulldog”, who became a mainstay of the group that organises the Tour. By now the daily pattern will have been set: an early break of a handful of riders from the lesser French teams, scooped up in time for a bunch sprint finish. Along with Ewan, other favourites include the evergreen Peter Sagan, France’s Arnaud Démare, Tim Merlier of Belgium, the Norwegian Alexandr Kristoff and perhaps the Frenchman Nacer Bouhanni.
