Pistards
It gives me great pleasure to watch the Deceunink-Quickstep squad in action, to see such pure expertise unfold at the crucial points. In yesterday’s express train of a stage, 160.4-kilometers, (100-miles), covered in an astounding 3 hours, 17-minutes…at an average speed of just under 49-kph (30.2-mph!), the team seemed in control the entire time. One moment was particularly telling, in the runup to the Green Jersey Sprint at kilometer 104.
The Tour has purposely been making the sprint stages shorter this year to incite more action and true to form, the race exploded out of the blocks with a breakaway getting clear, one that contained Deceunink-Quickstep’s Kasper Asgreen, a danger man for the GC. Sensing that the break was doomed, the Olympic Champion, Greg Van Avermaet, attacked off the break in company of the very large Roger Kluge, current World Madison (track race) Champion. Behind, the Wolfpack prepared the intermediate sprint with Mark Cavendish glued to the wheel of the world’s greatest lead-out man, the Dane Michael Mørkøv. Both Cav and Mørkøv, it should be noted, are expert track racers, schooled in the nuances of position and fine applications of effort. Mørkøv led out on the right, sensed Peter Sagan coming up on the left, and moved over across the front of the sprinting group to get his hip on Sagan’s handlebars to oh-so-subtlety squeeze him into the barriers, blocking the Slovak. Cav, trying to follow his pilot fish, got hooked up with Nacer Bouhanni, who seemed asleep in the sprint only waking up when he was halfway to the ground, and cut his effort. But you could see that Mørkøv and Cav had a real understanding of things, a sharing of that secret track racer language.
Van Avermaet, in his gold helmet, and Kluge put on a great show. The duo was never more than a minute up the road, but really fought with their guts to stay clear. They’d cleverly kept some energy in hand, because when the field really began to accelerate towards the finish with 20-kilometers to go, they accelerated too and for a while it looked as though they really had a chance to make it. Keep in mind that the two men rode at 50-kph + for almost three-hours in a truly heroic effort.
But the combined efforts of the Alpecin-Fenix – the young team has no fears - and the Deceunink-Quickstep put an end to their odyssey, sweeping them up with 2.5-k to the line. At 2-k, Julian Alaphilippe took to the front for the Wolfpack lining out the peloton, while the Yellow Jersey, Mathieu van der Poel did the same for his two sprinters, Tim Merlier and Jasper Philipsen – the team has a two-sprinter strategy, favoring one then the other depending on the day and whims of the team boss. Alaphilippe pulled off with 1.2-k to go giving the reins to Davide Ballerini, one of the unsung heroes of the Wolfpack, a sort of chiseled-from-Carrera-marble type of man, who took things up to warp speed before dropping the Mørkøv-Cavendish tandem into place. Behind, Merlier and Philipsen had lost van der Poel’s wheel and, amazlngly, the Yellow Jersey went back into the peloton to find them and bring them back to the front just in time to launch the sprint.
The two Alpecin-Fenix men were fast but Mark Cavendish had been expertly placed right on their wheels. The Manxman, in his 54x11 with his smooth, efficient style, came right around and oh-so-slightly, moved to his left, bouncing Merlier into his own teammate in a sprinting lesson the two young pups won’t soon forget. You could see Cavendish’s decades of experience, his track racing craft, all combined with that healthy dose of cut-throat that all sprinters need to succeed. Now Cavendish is at 32 career Tour stage win, two short of tying Eddy Merckx’s record of 34, and the UK is going nuts.
A note about the finish town of Châteauroux: it’s a great cycling community, one that knows how to use racing to publicize their bike-friendly culture and vast cycling infrastructure. Châteauroux was a longtime host to one of the richest post-Tour criteriums, during the era when the criterium managers ruled cycling, often determining how the big races were to be run in order to create stars and subsequent high appearance fees. Times have changed, the criterium no longer exists, but the town has always kept faith with the sport, hosting good races almost every year. Any race organizer would do well to visit Châteauroux, besides the fact that it’s a lovely place in a beautiful part of France, to see how racing is integrated into the community. There are lessons to be learned there.