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Sunday 20: 13:20β13:30 β 17:05β17:30
The last stage of this short sequence, starting from Toulouse suburbs with a bit of flat and the comeback of the Lauragais hills we visited a bit on Wednesday before a couple of serious climbs in the Montagne Noire and a long downhill/flat finish, is probably the less stereotyped stage we've had so far. It looks open to many different rider profiles.
Alaphilippeπ«π· WON THE SPRINT OF THE BREAKAWAY! πππ₯³ππ₯³ππ«π·πΎπΎπΎπ«π·π
for 3^rd^ place, oops... π€¦ π₯π₯π₯
It wasn't a bad stage, there were lots of fights in the hills to determine the breakaway and lots of fights in the climbs and the final part with the breakaway, but it ended up once more with another UAE win.
They guys ranked 10^th^ to 13^th^ in GC won a bit of time. Given the gaps, it doesn't change anything much. Just Rodriguez (InΓ©os) passes Healy (EF) whose team miscalculated the pace needed to pull the peloton a bit.
You have to wonder wtf Visma is doing attacking with two or three riders while Vingegaard is stuck in the second peloton and has to ride himself back to the main peloton.
Is that how you should treat a two time winner of the tour and the current second place in the GC? They shouldn't bring van Aert to the tour if this is how he's going to ride.
It's reckless and disrespectful and tbh he should find another team. But he won't because he needs stability.
But it seems like a team with weak DS leadership, always has seemed like that to me.
Vingegaard didn't "ride himself back to the main peloton", there were plenty of other riders to do most of the work in a group possibly larger than the first peloton, plenty of time to come back and almost nobody but Pogatchar (a lost cause) at the front (Vingegaard's closest main opponent Lipowitz had even gone to the ground).
Meanwhile at the front, just after the crash, the race entered the hills of Lauragais where many riders, including Visma riders, were planned (it wasn't random) to attack to build up a breakaway. It wasn't a matter of respect but pragmatism.
To me, Visma has strange and incomprehensible tactics which no other team with a potential tour winner would contemplate.
I know it was planned, but I don't know why they plan it like that. And why didn't Jorgenson drop back to help Vingegaard?
I also don't get why they bring van Aert to the tour when he's only interested in racing his own chance. He will attack one day and spend all his energy, then be tired whenever Vingegaard needs help. It seems to me like he has more to say than Niermann as the DS. Which is never healthy for a team.
Yeah it was very strange tactics from Visma again today. Storer and Simmons were also very critical of Campenaerts after the stage, saying he refused to work with the rest of the group to catch Wellens because "Wout is behind" even though Van Aert was well behind and realistically out of contention at that point. Funnily enough, Campenaerts also said something similar about Wellens - that he was refusing to work all day and won as a result. I get the feeling that the other teams didn't expect another UAE win today (and even UAE didn't plan for a win with Wellens only finding himself up the front due to the cirumstancces of the split after the crash) so there was a lot of frustration after the stage about the missed opportunity.