Pinot picks off leaders as Yates wins testing stage
On the steep climb to the finish here in Foix, Thibaut Pinot picked off his rivals one by one like a sniper. First Geraint Thomas and Steven Kruijswijk cracked as the Frenchman launched his attack. Then the yellow jersey of Julian Alaphilippe was left behind, before the gutsy Emanuel Buchmann also released his grip. The last one to go was Egan Bernal, Team Ineos’s prodigiously talented 22-year-old, who had grimaced and dug in to stay in contact, but stared down at the road for just a moment and looked back up to see Pinot riding away.
It was another thrilling chapter of what is proving to be a wildly open and unpredictable Tour de France, yet perhaps this was a sign of the GC hierarchy finally taking shape. Just as he triumphed so spectacularly on the Col du Tourmalet 24 hours earlier, Pinot repeated the trick here to announce himself as the strongest man in the mountains. Next comes a rest day and then a stage for the sprinters before this race takes to the Alpine skies, and right now the Frenchman is the man carrying all the momentum heading into days which will decide the destination of the maillot jaune.
Slightly overshadowed but no less impressive was the fact that Simon Yates won the stage itself, producing his second brilliant display within a few days to clinch his second win of the Tour. Last time it was an intelligently timed sprint, this time it was a powerful solo climb. The Briton came to the Tour de France to serve his twin brother Adam in a bid for the yellow jersey, but instead it is Simon who has brought their Mitchelton-Scott team glory, and he looks in supreme form to defend his Vuelta a Espana title later this year.
“I’m very proud of what I did there,” Yates said. “It was extremely hard from the start to the finish today but I raced how I like to, which is aggressive and I managed to pull it off. Today was the other day I had a chance for the stage win and I took it with both hands.”
Pinot crossed the finish line 33 seconds later with Movistar’s Mikel Landa – who unlike Yates has brought himself back into the general classification picture. Bernal and Buchmann were another 20 seconds back, before Thomas, Kruijswijk and finally Alaphilippe crossed the line. Alaphilippe keeps the yellow jersey for another day, but his lead from second-placed Thomas is down to only 1min 35sec, and what’s more, Pinot is coming for him.
“I expected a really hard day like today,” said Alaphilippe, having finally shown his first signs of weakness on this Tour. ”I gave everything, my team did a really good job to protect the yellow jersey. At the end I was on the limit but I’m really happy to stay in yellow. It will be a really hard final week so I just want to enjoy it.”
Alaphilippe’s struggles made Thomas’s task in the final throes more complicated, as with his co-leader Bernal further up the road he didn’t want to help drag the yellow jersey back into the race. “It was a shame because I got stuck behind Alaphilippe, so we just let him ride a bit and then kicked with 2k to go,” Thomas said. “It was a difficult one tactically, obviously I wasn’t going to pull towards Egan with those guys on my wheel, so I was caught between a rock and a hard place.”
On Pinot’s impressive back-to-back performances, Thomas added: “For sure he’s going really well, there’s so many guys. Kruijswijk, Pinot, Alaphilippe. They’re all going well.”
After losing 1min 40sec in the crosswinds last week, which left Pinot furious with his team-mates and pushed L’Equipe to run the headline “Pinot: the broken hope”, he has regained almost exactly the same time in the Pyrenees. He climbs from sixth to fourth overall and is back within two minutes of the yellow jersey.
But perhaps most crucially of all, right now he looks stronger than Alaphilippe, Thomas and Kruijswijk, the trio ahead of him in the overall standings. They will know more attacks are coming when the road kicks up over the Alps this week, and they will feat them. It has already been an extraordinary Tour de France for its host country, and an increasing possibility is that it could yet deliver the ultimate prize of a first French winner since the great Bernard Hinault in 1985.