19/07/2024

Bart Lemmen disappointed Wout van Aert didn't get a shot a stage win: "In case of a small group sprint, Wout wins in eighty percent of the cases. The tactic was clear"

Bart Lemmen was very impressive throughout the eighteenth stage of Tour de France. The Dutchman ultimately only cruised across the line in Barcelonnette as sixth, however whole Visma | Lease a Bike hoped to pull the Wout Van Aert card in the final. If only the Belgian wasn't stuck in the third group on the road.

Speaking his own performance, Lemmen can be quite happy with his day, however the icing on the cake is missing. "Ultimately you race to win," Lemmen said at WielerFlits. "The way I rode was good I think, just like my legs. But this wasn’t the result we came for."

"We rode away on the first climb," he refers to himself and Wout van Aert in an interview for Eurosport. "We got into a very large group. After that we rode quite calmly until I think the penultimate climb, where the race exploded."

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Lemmen put himself at Van Aert's service in the run-up towards the stage's final. He responded to numerous attacks and then kept his legs still. In the end, however, he ended up in a group that had started the chase on the leaders and so he was stuck between two groups. "My legs were pretty empty at the end. I could no longer do the work I wanted to do."

At NOS, Lemmen said that he and Van Aert hoped that it would eventually come to a sprint. "I think that would normally have happened, but those three rode away on the descent. I didn't brake there either and yet those guys pulled away. That's because that motorcycle is in front of them," he believes. "That's just annoying. If a motorcycle is twenty meters in front of it, you don't ride 80, but 85. Then you just ride away."

Lemmen doesn't know if he had the legs to win today. "I was really good. Can I win? Yes, definitely, but then it has to be very specific. But if you arrive here with Wout with five, six, twenty or maybe even fifty men, he wins in eighty percent of the cases. That was completely the tactic."