Something that’s changed over the last few years on the Tour is the use of smaller roads on the early stages. In my first Tour, we spent much of the opening week racing on big boulevards all day, but the roads in this area of France seem to be a lot narrower and have a lot of road furniture on them; traffic islands, bollards and ramps, which means that you had to have your wits about you all day.
spent most of today at the back of the peloton with a group of around 40 guys who’ve already crashed in this Tour and were leaving a little bit of space between the wheels, a little bit of braking time, just to try and avoid going down again.
With a long fast downhill leading into the narrow twisting finish today, it was the sort of day where every team goes to the start expecting something bad to happen but hoping it doesn’t happen to them.
The fight for a good position at the front is getting earlier and earlier every day and we saw the cost of that with more crashes today.
Although they only had two or three minutes for most of the day, at one point it didn’t look like the breakaway was going to be caught.
One of the Lotto-Soudal guys, who was riding for his sprinter Caleb Ewan, reckoned the problem was that the GC teams, afraid of missing a split in the bunch and losing a few seconds, were hindering the sprint teams’ chase at the front and the break was actually gaining time.
Today the fight started with about 80km to go. At one point, as pointy elbows and hefty shoulders came to the fore at the front of the peloton, a wry smile broke across my face when I realised the town we were flying through was aptly named ‘Josselen’.
It’s a constant battle to be a GC rider now and the carnage involved is really crazy – so crazy that Mike (Woods), who came into this Tour with the aim of riding GC, is actually quite happy to have lost time on day one now and not have to go to war in the finale every day.
Andre (Greipel) was to go for the sprint today but he punctured with about 45km to go. Although he got back on 6km later, the race was flat-out and there was no moving up at that point.
With 12km to go, a few FDJ guys hit the deck on the left-hand side of the road. I wasn’t near it and managed to get past it, but within a kilometre there was another crash, this time involving pre-race favourite Primoz Roglic, who had his whole team wait to help him chase back on as we rode past.
The first crash had split the bunch and in my group, Rigoberto Uran and David Gaudu’s team-mates were driving hard to try and get their leaders back into contention. While I’ve already lost time and don’t need to be making those efforts, today I just wanted to open my legs up a bit again. After the effort I made yesterday, I felt much more like myself. My legs were better today and I was sharper, so I wanted to make that effort rather than ride into the finish easy.
We just regained contact with the front group with around 5km to go, where I looked down at my computer on the downhill leading into the finish and saw that we were doing almost 80kph without pedalling. A kilometre later, another big crash happened on a right-hander, and it really wasn’t nice to be riding through all those bodies again today.
From there on, it was just a case of our group of survivors rolling to the line and getting the day over with. We got out of the way as Roglic and Miguel Angel Lopez stormed past with 2km remaining, their team-mates trying to limit their losses and save their Tour.
Up ahead, in the sprint to the line, won by Tim Merlier, there was another horrific crash with Caleb Ewan and Peter Sagan getting tangled at 65kph. It’s remarkable that more guys didn’t go down.
For what was supposed to be a simple sprint stage, today has had a big effect on the race, with a lot of pre-race favourites hitting the deck and losing time, including Geraint Thomas who dislocated his shoulder in a crash after 35km.
If it had been raining, it would have been a lot worse. I think there will be a lot of unhappy riders tomorrow. It’s one thing giving out about the finish afterwards, but we all knew what was ahead before we started. Nobody complained about it. You can’t change what’s happened now. All you can do is learn from the mistakes for the future.
Tour de France,
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