Thomas remains in yellow
PAU: Briton Geraint Thomas stayed safe in the yellow jersey as Frenchman Arnaud Demare won stage 18 of the Tour de France in Pau.
GroupamaFDJ’s Demare held off Christophe Laporte, of Cofidis, and Alexander Kristoff, of UAE Team Emirates, in a sprint finish to claim his second career Tour win and his first this year.
Team Sky’s Thomas crossed the line with the front group to ensure he held on to his advantage of one minute and 59 seconds over Tom Dumoulin, of Team Sunweb, going into last night’s mountain test in the Pyrenees.
Demare’s stage win came as German sprinter Andre Greipel, already out of this year’s Tour, apologised to him on Twitter after suggesting in an earlier post that Demare had used illegitimate means in order to avoid missing the time cut when struggling on the Col du Portet.
Despite Greipel’s apology, Demare said he had used his comments as motivation.
‘‘I can thank Greipel today,’’ he said.
‘‘I thought of him a lot.’’ Greipel wrote: ‘‘My apology go out to @ArnaudDemare and @GroupamaFDJ as I have had not the right to make that tweet based on GPS time, which can be wrong, plus I got the incorrect times he lost on the last hill. I’m sorry. Lesson learned: don’t tweet about sth you are not part off.’’
The sprint stage was contested by a vastly depleted field of quick men following the exits of Mark Cavendish, Marcel Kittel, Andre Greipel, Fernando Gaviria, Dylan Groenewegen and Michael Matthew at various points in the Tour so far. World champion Peter Sagan was also not the factor he might usually be after a nasty crash the day before.
The BoraHansgrohe rider hobbled to his bike in the morning but put his team on the front in the final kilometres, finishing eighth.
Sagan needs simply to make it to Paris to secure his sixth career green jersey.
This was a largely uneventful stage, no doubt welcome to those still with an eye on the fight for yellow.