It's crunch time for these 5 Tour de France GC riders 🇫🇷
After nine days of losing ground, these riders need to find their legs on the first mountain stage
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After nine stages of punchy racing, sprint finishes and one critical time trial, the Tour de France heads into a new phase on stage 10 with the peloton entering the Massif Central mountains for what will be a defining juncture in this year’s Tour de France.
The three main podium contenders sit first, second and fourth in the race right now, with Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) leading Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step) by 54 seconds and Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) at 1:17.
Kévin Vauquelin currently splits up the big three, with the Frenchman occupying third overall, but despite his best intentions, he’s likely to fade, at least one place, in the coming days.
Several minutes off the battle for the current podium sit five GC contenders who have consistently lost time in this year’s race, with Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek), Enric Mas (Movistar), Carlos Rodríguez (Ineos Grenadiers) and Ben O’Connor (Jayco-AlUla) spread several minutes down.
The quintet will be relieved to have made it through the first week of tense racing, but the 165.3 km stage from Ennezat to Le Mont-Dore Puy de Sancy, with its 4,307 m of climbing, will shake up the race and offers those currently behind the leading pack a chance to revive their GC ambitions. The podium is probably out of reach at this point for most if not all of these riders, but there’s still plenty to compete for.
To illustrate the importance of stage 10, here’s Matteo Jorgenson, who is likely to be tasked with making the stage incredibly aggressive and placing all of Vingegaard’s rivals under as much pressure as possible.
“Tomorrow, my expectations are that it’s going to be a key and decisive stage. The first mountains that we’ve seen in the Tour de France, which is always a big explosion and we’ll see big time gaps,” Jorgenson said at the start this morning.
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Carlos Rodríguez (Ineos Grenadiers) 🇪🇸
GC position: 15th at 4:51
This has been a tough Tour de France for the Spaniard, who has consistently lost time during the first week of racing. His team have been keen to emphasise that the high mountains will help level the playing field, but all signs so far suggest that Rodríguez is well below the form that saw him win a Tour stage and nearly challenge the podium in the race a few years ago. He missed the first split on stage 1 and has been chasing the climbers with sounder accelerations and power across northern France ever since.
Granted, the longer climbs suit the 24-year-old much better, on paper, but there’s no indication at this stage that he is better than the riders mentioned in this article, except O’Connor, who crashed on stage 1. The former Tour de l'Avenir will still likely crack the top ten, but a top five seems unlikely at this point.
At the start of stage 9 in Chinon, I caught up with the Spaniard’s sports director, Zak Dempster.
“I think it’s always going to be a surprise in the Massif Central so let's see. There’s meant to be a bit of rain tomorrow so that might change of what you think of that area given that you might think it’s a baking hot and sticky stage. Let’s see. It’s going to be a good test for us and for everyone,” Dempster told me and me alone.
“We’d rather be further forward, but I think it's going to be the first proper mountain stage. We’ve done climbs, but as of yesterday, we’d only done about 25 per cent of the climbs so far, so it’s going to be a real start of that GC battle. Obviously, we expect him to be as far forward as possible. It depends a bit on what Visma want to do, they seem to be trying to test everyone on each stage and are trying to put fatigue into the bunch, which suits us just fine. So, whether the break goes down the road and we get a bit of a Jai Hindley situation from a couple of years ago, with the GC battle behind. But regardless, we need to have those moves covered with guys like Thymen or Geraint to go up the road, and in terms of Carlos, we’re trying to take time,” he said.
I asked Dempster if the team’s emphasis was on chasing the top three main favourites or focusing on the GC riders in and around Rodríguez’s position.
“I wouldn’t say that we’re so focused on anyone at the moment. We’re at where we’re at on GC and we just have to chip away at it. Considering we’ve not done the real climbs yet, focusing on those top three GC guys would be a mistake, so we’re just focusing on our own race,” he said.