Tour de France Stage 13 Preview

Pau again and a sprint stage but with some hills in the finish.

Gros Lot: some attacks at the start and four strong riders got away. But only four and they were not allowed space. Alpecin’s Silvan Dillier seemed to be towing for hours, Movistar helped too but it meant two of Dillier’s team mates missed the time cut.

On the approach to the finish Alexey Lutsenko tangled with a central divider and fell, prompting a big crash that included Mathieu van der Poel who was not able to be on lead out duty. Primož Roglič fared badly, he seemed to slam to the ground. He soon back chasing but somehow without urgency, as if Roglič couldn’t ride hard and he lost over two minutes.

In the sprint Dan McLay dropped off Arnaud Démare for a long sprint and it looked like his good old days were back with a trademark long sprint but he faded right at the end, and got relegated for drifting right. This move wasn’t diabolical but ended Wout van Aert’s chances of revival as once again he was up against the barriers. Mark Cavendish was also relegated but it’s doubtful he lost sleep. Both moves were questionable but there’s no doctrinal understanding here, the verdict is published without reasoning.

Biniam Girmay didn’t get a leadout but he was ferried into position Mike Teunissen as if the pair were late arrivals at a theatre, hurriedly squeezing past seated patrons to reach their reserved seats before the show started. Girmay timed it right again and took a third win.

Girmay leads the points competition by over 100 points and, for illustration, Philipsen would need to win today and once again without Girmay scoring at all in the finish just to close the gap.

The Route: 165km and 2000m of vertical gain. The final picks up the same roads as used in 2012 for the stage to Pau won by Pierrick Fedrigo, that year the climb near Monassut-Audiracq was categorised, 1.5km at 5.5%. It’s these hills that could suit a breakaway if enough riders collaborate and try to spice up the finish.

The Finish: flat boulevards in Pau.

The Contenders: sprint or breakaway? The same question as opportunities for both are fading. We did see stronger riders and more teams trying to go clear yesterday but the sprinters won again.

The hillier approach can tire some riders so Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck), Wout van Aert (Visma-LAB) and Biniam Girmay (Intermarché-Wanty) seem best suited.

Wheel-of-fortune picks for the breakaway win are Jasper Stuyven (Lidl-Trek), Oier Lazkano (Movistar) and Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ)

–
Philipsen, WvA, Girmay
Cavendish

Weather: 21°C and sunshine. A westerly wind will blow at about 20km/h and crucially it could gust more meaning the potential for crosswinds but not the certainty.

TV: KM0 is at 1.50pm CEST and the finish is forecast for 5.30pm CEST. Tune in for the final hour to see the hills and if the wind has got up.

Postcard from Pau
Pau again. With 76 visits it’s the third most regular haunt of the Tour de France after Paris (145) and Bordeaux (82). Paris is obvious as the finish and it has hosted a stage start 35 times too. Bordeaux makes sense as a big city that is an obvious stopping point for all the years when the race lapped around the outside of France but it’s arguably a 20th century venue as it’s only hosted two stage starts and one finish this century. On current trends Pau will soon become the second most visited stop.

Why Pau? It’s almost at the foot of the Pyrenees. Almost is worth stating in case anyone visits with expectations of the Tourmalet being a short spin away. But it is a large city, sits on the A64 autoroute and has plenty of hotels. This last factor is important as the Tour requires at least 4,500 hotel beds a night, one third of this is booked by ASO for the teams and all the organisation from the UCI commissaires to the publicity caravan staff; the rest are media and others working on the race who make their own bookings.

For years the Tour used makeshift dormitories, the likes of Eddy Merckx sometimes had to spend the night on a camp bed in a school gymnasium. Even parsimonious Raymond Poulidor said sometimes he felt like paying for a hotel after a hard day’s racing but would be disqualified. It’s still a rule today that teams must use the accommodation supplied by the race.

Every year when the route is unveiled the sight of Pau might be met with mentions of “encore” and “again” but it a nice place to send a postcard. A student town with its castle, the view of the Pyrenees, a paved square. Pau it has its charms and beats Tarbes, the other large place to the east. But if you are not tasked with block-booking thousands of rooms and plan to ride in the Pyrenees take your pick from many of the smaller towns and villages closer to the mountains.

63 thoughts on “Tour de France Stage 13 Preview”

      • Dunno. He is not in the team for either road or ITT (where Slovenia´s quota is one rider). Haven´t seen his comment on being left out (if he has commented on it publicly) and I can´t remember what his opinion on the subject was last year (if he expressed it in an interview).

      • I think I heard some of the TdF commentators say that he elected not to race the Olympics. Perhaps he had the TdF – Vuelta combo in mind. He is obviously the reigning olympic TT champ, so presumably his own decision rather than lack of selection, but who knows with the Slovenian olympic selectors !

  2. Just happy to be the first comment- from San Diego, CA! Breakaway wins, and GC chills. Pidcock or an AG2R. Most riveting TDF in some time. Cheers to all of you and a chapeau to our host.

    • All cycling fans enjoy it when the second placed rider doesn’t know the winner is in front of them and launches a wild celebration as they cross the line.

      Now we get to enjoy that in the comments section 🤣

  4. Aldag mentioned Roglic could not go faster after the crash and his team almost dropped him multiple times. There was a suspicion of a concussion…

    In any case: he was in a bad position once again when the crash happened. All his rivals were at the front while he and his team where at position 30-40.
    While he seems to act like a magnet to bad luck, but sometimes one wonders whether there is more to it that makes him prone to crashes like a less than ideal positioning, etc.

    • Trouble is that if you count Pogi, Remco and Jonas and their teams, Ineos, Decathlon then sprinters and their teams you reach 30 – 40 riders very quickly. Rogla got in crashes even when he was in front towed by WVA and Jumbo train. Now whether he’s unlucky or lacks some skills is a different debate.

      • Agreed – and a good argument why GC leaders also need a strong team that keeps them well positioned on flat days, too. Saw a few Bora guys chilling and chatting at the back of the pack yesterday 30km from the finish.

          • Yes, why on earth don’t they take the GC at 10km to go and let a second peleton ride in steady – then the sprinters and they’re helpers can fight it out.
            Public get to see more of the cyclists too.

          • It’s an absolute no from me to taking GC times anywhere other than the finish line on any stage other than a final day circuit finish.

            The GC is the classification which has a privileged position as the classification which awards the Outright title, and therefore should require that the winning rider show they can handle racing the entire course.

            If GC times were to be taken at 10km to go, it should be renamed the ‘timed classification’ and the points and mountains classifications elevated to equal status in terms of prizes, with the Outright winner being the winner of their classification who has the proportionally greatest winning margin.

      • While yesterday was unfortunate, when you crash as many times as he does, then it’s no longer ‘bad luck’, it’s a pattern. He came to cycling late, so has very little in the way of skills, and falls off too many times . He’s never going to be as good as Pidcock/MvdP, but do his teams actually do anything to help?

        Maybe he’s now in a Red Bull team they’ll get a few of their MTB athletes to give him some instruction…..

    • I think it is also worth mentioning that Roglic was with his teammates at the moment of the crash, but they were all behind him. I don’t understand that. Normally a leader sits at least in position 2 or 3 in his team’s “train” in order to be protected.

      • In all probability this was just a quip, but for those who aren´t familiar with Roglic´ ski-jumping past:
        he didn´t quit the sport because he wasn´t good at it, he quit because he had one bad crash too many – and while in ski jumping you can crash without your own fault when the conditions turn against you, it is simply so that some jumpers are more prone to crash, or just less good at sensing things (body position, wind, pressure) and thus less capable of saving the situation.

  6. Primoz Roglic was unlucky yet again but it just highlights the “ride at the front ” thing. He got caught by a fairly minor crash ( I believe the Astana rider was OK) as he was halfway back in the Peloton. This is not exactly news, not everyone can be there but will just add to the pressure to push in and create the tension that leads to these sort of incidents. No amount of fiddling with the 3km rule or time gaps at the finish will help.

    The Cav relegation was about as sensible as the VAR penalty decisions at the football! Fortunately it made not a jot of difference.

  7. Having written “there’s no doctrinal understanding here, the verdict is published without reasoning”… along comes a piece in this morning’s L’Equipe that has a senior UCI official explaining how the sprint rules are interpreted, the evolution in the thinking and more, exactly what is needed. It’s behind a paywall but one lesson is you can change lanes as long as you don’t interfere with other riders, think of it as moving corridor rather than a set of painted lanes on the road.

  8. To be honest I felt that was Demare’s lane and that’s racing. Having said that, did van Aert touch his brakes and then still overtake Demare? If so, the relegation makes Demare look relevant when he wasn’t.

      • Yes, I didn’t phrase that very well. My point was that if Demare wasn’t relegated then it would sting to realize he’d been passed by someone who had braked half way through the sprint.

    • I think the problem with Demare was his lead out man McLay. Once McClay had finished his lead out he free wheeled. resulting in several including Cavendish to switch suddenly to find a gap and Van Aert to brake.
      How utterly crazy and dangerous is it to freewheel at the front of a tight bunch sprint?

      • Absolutely this. McLay should have been sanctioned for dangerous riding, you can’t do a lead out then just stop pedalling in the middle of the road.

      • Once the leadout is done there’s not much to do. Sometimes the leadout can peel off and “cleverly” block others and make it harder to get around, it’s almost a professional foul but one that if a rider pulls a few times they’ll get known for it and pay.

  9. You bought back some memories that I had long since forgotten INRNG. Staying every evening in dormitories or gymnasiums, both religious or school, in races like like the Essor Breton. Sleeping with a large number of fellow competitors, we thought nothing of it at the time!

    • The U23 Giro has done it more recently.

      Cyclists aren’t footballers but the top ones do have a luxury lifestyle with sports cars, private jet flights and an entourage of helpers… but go racing and they’re back in the Campanile or Jolly. The Tour does have some luxury hotels for the teams along the way too but it’s as likely to be in a budget motel beside the autoroute.

  10. Interesting stat on pcs this morning. Roglic crashes on average once every 17.9 race race days
    There idays. By contrast pog and Remco are both at once every 3o race days

  11. If you’re in the area, i’d recommend going for a wander around Lourdes. I toured through here in 2010 and was amazed and the religious iconoggraphy adorning every wall, shop window and square inch of retail. The Tourmalet, Soulor, Ardiden and the very best of the Pyrenees is literally on the doorstep from there..

    Cavendish with 1 plaque – nice to see it. Hope he bags another before the mountains.

    • Each to their own, I suggest seeing Lourdes once as the amount of icons is too much. Emile Zola had it right it over a century ago when he described bathing in the waters used by hundreds each day as becoming like “a soup, a consommé of ailments” and the amount of trinkets sold then already was “frightful, frightful”.

        • Went and found the real quote:

          “the water was scarcely inviting; for, through fear lest the output of the source should not suffice, the Fathers of the Grotto only allowed the water of the baths to be changed twice a day. And nearly a hundred patients being dipped in the same water, it can be imagined what a terrible soup the latter at last became. All manner of things were found in it, so that it was like a frightful consomme of all ailments, a field of cultivation for every kind of poisonous germ, a quintessence of the most dreaded contagious diseases; the miraculous feature of it all being that men should emerge alive from their immersion in such filth.”

    • I’d like it if he won but he just seems to be finding it hard to get past the others, plus he’s talking about being here to learn. Give him a 400m sprint uphill at 3-4% and he’d do it. Still one to watch in the finish if the hills are ridden hard.

      • Thanks Inner Ring. Have greatly enjoyed your coverage of the tour this year and inputs of the very knowledgeable contributors in your comment sections.

    • Even if it don’t spread through the team, Pog is a domestique (and top-10 candidate) down, hardly ideal second week for UAE so far.

    • The newer strains of covid are so mild, that non-elite athletes might not think twice about it. But when seconds matter among these “most elite of the elite” athletes, I suppose any disruption to recovery, sleep quality, etc, would be worrisome

      • Said it before here but worth repeating to back your point, it’s not a public health emergency any more but it is potentially ruinous for riders’ ambitions. Someone may feel fine to go out for a spin, sit at a desk, stand in a factory etc but it’s different when you need to do 400W to avoid being dropped, game over.

      • Apparently, it is a little worse than “seconds matter” aspect, at least if we go by what happened in Team Bahrain or Cofidis (or in the case of Ayuso himself). If it was little more than a cold or a mild flu, the athletes could take it easy during these transition stages, recover a bit and in the while just wait for the third week which still offers good occasions for some breakaway, be it only for the affected cyclist to support a teammate. But what we’re seeing is that they aren’t even able to finish the stage, no matter how hard they try, whether because of the fast pace in the first hour or as they struggle to comply with the time limit.

  18. Uff, I know that we’re now left with just one or two at most sprint stages, but, hey, 7/13 bunch sprints is really sickening for me (thank you Bardet or they’d be even 8!). Especially with their very modest technical content (as we can see from all those relegations, too, among so many other details). Only happy for Girmay.
    Granted, the other 6 stages provided a huge deal of excitement, so a beautiful TDF all the same, of course, but hadn’t we have the good ol’ kamikaze Pogi on the start line this was going to be a poor show. And, as I said, we’re at the point where, all the fireworks notwithstanding, I really really don’t want to see any further sprint stage for a good while.

  19. Did Pogacar really sprint with the first group? I mean… why? Testing his finishing skills in the middle of his second GT of the year?

    • Maybe it’s an insurance policy in case the race is decided on countback? Otherwise, it makes no sense, especially given the very real possibility of being caught up in a crash.

      • A countback is extremely unlikely, since this GT has 2 TTs. If two riders have equal GC times, then the hundredths (or thousandths) of a second (as measured in the TTs) come in play, before the countback. The countback came in effect earlier in this tour because at that time we did not have a TT result.
        The reason is that, at the end of the stage, Pogi was not guaranteed a -st- (same time) with the stage winner. If he did not sprint, he could be caught behind a time split. He was actively racing while the other GC men were caught behind an accident and guaranteed a -st-.
        Finally, sprinting is not intrinsically risky. Sprinting in nonexistent space is risky, but he was sprinting in open road. Actually it was safer for him to sprint, in order to avoid being hit from behind. (I am not saying that this was a real possibility under the circumstances, just that you never know.)

        • Thanks for the clarification of the rules. The real risk in the sprint isn’t the sprint itself, but the positioning and maneuvering leading up to it. Pog is a great bike handler, but that doesn’t make him immune from someone else’s bad decisions around him. I still find his decision not to sit up baffling.

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