Ireland’s Dan Martin had his best performance of this year’s Tour de France on Sunday, finishing eighth at the end of what is effectively his home stage.
Martin, son of Stephen Roche’s sister Maria, grew up in Birmingham and has lived in France and Girona during his professional career, but now resides in Andorra.
He did what he could to chase a home victory, infiltrating the day’s big breakaway along with Israel Start Up Nation team-mate Michael Woods, who was leading the King of the Mountains classification. However, both lacked a little firepower on the final climb and were distanced by several riders.
Martin rolled in at the head of a five-man group one minute 22 seconds behind the stage winner Sepp Kuss (Jumbo-Visma), and seven seconds off the group sprinting for third. Although he missed out on the stage victory, he will be encouraged by his improving form as the race heads into Monday’s rest day and then the Tour’s final week.
“With so many strong guys in the breakaway, I think this may go down as one of the strongest breakaways in the Tour de France,” he said.
“As a team, we had two objectives today: the KOM jersey and the stage win. Mike [Woods] and I tried our best, I just didn’t have the legs on the last climb. We lost the polka dot jersey but it’s still really close and I think it’s going to be a close battle all the way to Paris. I really like riding with Mike. We work well together, and we have a really good relationship. Now, we are going to enjoy the rest day tomorrow and then make a plan for the final week.”
Martin took a stage win and finished tenth overall in the Giro d’Italia in May, and has clearly felt some residual fatigue from that three-week event. His confidence will be growing, however, and he still has time to chase what would be the third Tour de France stage win of his career.
Sepp Kuss took the stage from Céret to Andorra la Vella after a 32-rider breakaway disintegrated on the final climbs of the Port d’Envalira and the first category Col de Bexailis. The 26-year-old from Colorado held off the veteran Alejandro Valverde on the descent to Andorra, to take a career-first win in the Tour.
On what could, on the eve of the second rest day, have been classified as ‘moving day,’ both the Ineos Grenadiers and Jumbo-Visma teams opted to gamble on dislodging race leader Tadej Pogacar with a change in tactics. Both teams, increasingly desperate to find the defending champion’s weak spot, sent riders into the 32-man group with the hope of pressurising the seemingly implacable Slovenian and his UAE Emirates team.
The 2018 Tour winner, Geraint Thomas, the erstwhile Ineos Grenadiers leader, now recovering little by little from the three crashes that derailed his Tour, led his teammate Richard Carapaz over the penultimate climb, and the 2021 Tour’s highest point, the 2,408 metre Port d’Envalira.
On the 80 km/h descent, the Welshman then bridged across to teammates, Dylan van Baarle and Jonathan Castroviejo, which, with Pogacar isolated from his own team, gave Ineos four riders in the front group. Yet even that was not enough to perturb the limpet-like Pogacar, who despite the lack of team support, held off a series of attacks from his rivals in the stage’s closing kilometres.
Four kilometres from the top of the winding and narrow final climb of the Beixalis, Carapaz attacked, with Pogacar and Kuss’s teammate, Jonas Vingegaard, and Rigoberto Urán, of EF Education-Nippo, on his wheel. After that failed, it was Vingegaard’s turn and then Urán’s. Throughout it all, however, Pogacar remained unperturbed.
“I don’t think he’s unbreakable,” Thomas said, “but as Dave Brailsford would say, he’s like a bamboo. He bends, but he rarely snaps, so we will see. But you’ve got to keep faith and confidence. Anyone can have a bad day. He’s been racing hard and aggressively from the start, so you just never know.” – Guardian
