Ice storm brings bad news for French riders at Tour
TIGNES, FRANCE >> In an instant, the most exciting Tour de France in decades became truly bizarre.
A violent hailstorm threw cycling’s greatest race into chaos Friday, forcing organizers to cut short a nail-biting stage in the high Alps because riders were speeding, unbeknownst to them, headlong toward a road that had suddenly become covered with ice and giant puddles and cut in half by a rockslide.
Concerned for riders’ safety on mountain roads that can be dangerous at the best of times, race organizers made an on-the-spot and extremely rare decision that the race couldn’t continue.
The shockwave was immediate and heavy in repercussions. With riders unable to reach the planned finish at the ski station of Tignes, organizers decided that riders’ placings would instead be based on their time at the top of the highest mountain pass of this Tour — the Iseran, at 9,090 feet above sea level.
And just like that, Egan Bernal found himself in the yellow jersey.
He flew away from Julian Alaphilippe on the climb and reached the top 2 minutes, 7 seconds ahead of the Frenchman who had held the race lead for a total of 14 days.
Bernal was speeding down hairpins on the other side, with Alaphilippe hot on his trail when they received the order to stop racing.
“I don’t really know what happened. I was speeding, attacking, and everything was going well and then they told me to stop. I didn’t want to stop,” Bernal said. “When they told me that I was the race leader and I had the yellow jersey, I couldn’t believe it and I still can’t believe it.”
Organizers scrambled to deal with the disarray and riders clambered off their bikes, not immediately sure what was going on. Exceptionally, there was no winner of Stage 19, because no one had reached the finish.
“This Tour is crazy,” race director Christian Prudhomme said. “We would never have imagined a day like this.”
Prudhomme said the hairraising speeds of Bernal, Alaphilippe and other riders on the downhill from the Iseran in part prompted the decision to stop the race there and then.
“We could see that they were taking risks, and we knew that they couldn’t go much further,” he said. “The only thing that counts is the riders’ health and safety.”
Ahead of today’s final trek in the Alps, the last competitive stage before a traditional processional ride to Paris, Bernal is in an ideal position to become the first Colombian to win cycling biggest race.
Earlier in the day, France suffered another blow when Thibaut Pinot, who had been in fifth place, dropped out of the race.