What is happening at the Critérium du Dauphiné?
Should we turn it off and on again?
Stage 6 took on a new level of strangeness in a race that consisted mainly of answering the question “Will Wout van Aert win today or will he ruin it?”
On the last day before the mountains, however, the Belgian finally seemed full. Two stage victories and one stage with the leader’s jersey meant that Jumbo-Visma did not have to burn all his matches and kill himself for another stage victory before a leg test weekend. climbing by Primož Roglič and Jonas Vingegaard.
They are forgiven for what happened, then. What happened was that he was allowed to win a break, and then a runner from that break was allowed to win, and it seemed like no one in the whole world saw anything coming. Someone also got punched.
What about the rest of the pack? If we also remove the teams represented at the break, TotalEnergies (Valentin Ferron), B&B Hotels-KTM (Pierre Rolland), Arkéa-Samsic (Warren Barguil), Quick-Step AlphaVinyl (Andrea Bagioli), Ag2r Citroën (Geoffrey Bouchard) and Cofidis ( Victor Lafay), who still leaves 15 teams, 13 of which have yet to win this week.
We’re talking about people like BikeExchange-Jayco and Dylan Groenewegen, Trek-Segafredo and Jasper Stuyven, as well as Lotto-Soudal, Israel – Premier Tech and EF Education EasyPost, who could use the points even in the ongoing relegation battle. if they don’t have a fast man to pair up with the best teams.
Of course, people like Bora, Ineos, Jumbo-Visma and Trek-Segafredo got involved in a so-called chase, but if they really wanted to catch the group of six weighing an average of 64 kg, they could have done so. .
Once it became clear that the winner would come from the break, the fugitives continued to work together, unlike their counterparts in the platoon. But then, practically, they let Valentin Ferron jump in early, the others look at each other, waiting for someone else to do the dirty work.
Sure, you don’t want to drag your collaborators to the line, but surely you don’t want to give up any chance of winning either? Nor is a victory at the Dauphiné an insignificant result … simply, nothing that has happened this week makes much sense.
Between the non-winning members of the break and the passengers of the platoon, it was a day when bike races were certainly not the winners.
Although the only real loser of the day was, without a doubt, Juan Sebastián Molano of the UAE Team Emirates, who protested against Hugo Page (Intermarché-Wanty-Gobert Matériaux) in the match due to a certain indiscretion before to punch the 20-year-old Frenchman in the face.
After the finish, Molano said “in the heat of the moment I made a dangerous mistake”, apologizing to Page and all the drivers in the race for the incident. “I understand why I was disqualified and I can only say that I regret it and learn from it,” said the Colombian, without taking advantage of any of the first 27 years of his life to face the blow of someone in the face. while cycling at warp speed is something you probably shouldn’t do.
The irony that sums up this Dauphiné? Molano sprinted to seventh place, the first to cross the line of the peloton, finding somehow more motivation than the rest of the group to acquire a result he knew he would not count. Excellent.
Criterium du Dauphiné (2.UWT) Ribes → Gap