‘Buzz’ of yellow weighing heavily on leader Thomas
CARCASSONNE: A history-making chapter in the life of Geraint Thomas may be around the corner, but the “buzz” of wearing the Tour de France yellow jersey is starting to weigh heavily.
“Wearing the yellow jersey, you get a buzz out of that,” Thomas said after his fourth full day in the race lead he took on stage 11 with the first of two successive wins in the high Alps.
Thomas finished the 15th stage in relative calm on Sunday with his 1min 39secs lead on Sky teammate Chris Froome intact ahead of yesterday’s rest day.
Danish race debutant Magnus Cort Nielsen handed Astana their second consecutive victory when he won the 15th stage.
Thomas’ dream of upstaging the fourtime champion Froome to become the Tour’s first Welsh winner is being challenged on all fronts.
From uncertainty over his role for Sky in the final week, to the virulent criticism of his team as they continue to dominate with impunity, Thomas is unlikely to forget what has been his most successful Grand Tour so far.
The race resumes today, the first of three days in the Pyrenees likely to see Dutchman Tom Dumoulin (Sunweb), third at 1:50, among Sky’s biggest challengers.
But Sky, and Thomas in particular, are under attack from outside the race.
Marc Madiot, the manager of the Groupama team and the president of the MPCC (Movement for Clean Cycling), which Team Sky have refuse to join, expressed dismay at the manner in which an anti-doping case concerning Froome was dropped by the International Cycling Union (UCI) days before the Tour began.
A day before that decision, Tour organisers had announced they had banned Froome, who returned an “adverse analytical finding” for double the permitted amount of the asthma drug salbutamol at last year’s Tour of Spain.
“I think cycling and the Tour de France have a credibility problem. You only need to ask a few people on the side of the road to see,” Madiot told French television on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Italian Gianni Moscon of Team Sky was thrown off the race on Sunday after an altercation with a fellow rider, officials said.
Race officials took the decision after Moscon was involved in a fracas with a rider from the Fortuneo team shortly after the stage start in Millau.