![]() ![]() At the front of the race, the manpower contained in the break was suboptimal – 184km is a long way to share the work between four riders, let alone three, as the break counted until Eenkhoorn arrived. Stage 18 was equally won and lost in its alliances. Yet O’Connor, Harper and Haig all traded pulls as if they were on the same team. The success of the break would favour all three riders, despite all being close on GC and rivals for the top five or six in Paris. It also contained Gall’s teammate Ben O’Connor, Yates’ teammate Chris Harper and Bilbao’s teammate Jack Haig. On stage 17, for example, the break contained Felix Gall of AG2R-Citroën, Simon Yates of Jayco Alula and Pello Bilbao of Bahrain-Victorious. It’s easy to suggest that riders should go into breaks, but by this point in the Tour, many are just surviving.īike races are won and lost in the temporary alliances that form over the course of the day. The final complicating factor is that everybody is shattered, especially after the brutal queen stage of the race yesterday, over the Col de la Loze to Courchevel. EF Education-EasyPost, TotalEnergies, Arkéa-Samsic, Movistar, Astana and Groupama-FDJ were winless and sprinter-less through to stage 18, with four opportunities left. Before stage 18, a dozen teams still had not won a stage, though it was surprising on that front that not more tried to infiltrate the break of the day. The politics of the peloton have also shifted through the comparative successes and failures of each team. The chasing peloton (Image by Charly Lopez/ASO) ![]() Perhaps the fact that Jasper Philipsen has won all four bunch sprints in the Tour so far weakened the motivation of other teams to share in the work. Through stage 18, Alpecin, Jayco and Lidl worked to keep the break under control, but even the other sprinters’ teams seemed reluctant to contribute. Cavendish and Jakobsen were hobbled by crashes, which meant two of the important allies of the sprinters, Soudal and Astana, were now enemies, with their own interests. The alliances that held through the opening sprint stages – Alpecin-Deceuninck, Soudal–Quick-Step, Astana Qazaqstan, Jayco Alula, DSM-Firmenich, Lidl-Trek and Bahrain-Victorious all came with strong sprinters and the motivation to keep things together for them – have been eroded and changed as the race has developed. Read more: Opinion: Jasper Philipsen’s loss on stage 18 was karma ![]() However, bike racing is less formulaic than it used to be also the third week of the Tour de France is not at all like the first week. Normally, a four-man break (which only became a quartet when Eenkhoorn bridged across a little over halfway through the stage) would not have much hope of holding off a chasing peloton at the Tour de France, especially as the lead went under a minute with 35km to go. ![]()
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