While neither UAE Team Emirates nor Visma | Lease a Bike seemed overly interested in taking the stage 20, for Soudal - Quick-Step it was an opportunity for one last shot at Jonas Vingegaard's second spot overall. The team around Remco Evenepoel took control over the course of action to prepare a hopefully decisive strike of their leader.
However Evenepoel wasn't able to get rid of the Dane and when the Visma leader accelerated himself, the White jersey had to give in and follow his own pace in the final kilometers. With that his dream of second position is probably gone, but there's still a good chance to take another stage win in the final time trial.
Also read
Patrick Lefevere calls Visma "sore losers" after comments about Tadej Pogacar's greediness
Evenepoel's teammate Ilan Van Wilder was in charge of the pace until the start of Couillole. "We tried to make the race hard, to wear Vingegaard down a bit and still attack second place. We wanted to gain a few more seconds on the final climb, because we thought he didn't look great yesterday. But we were clearly wrong," Van Wilder admits to WielerFlits. "He was very good today. Certainly no regrets about our race, we did everything we wanted to do but it didn't turn out the way we had hoped. But that's no problem."
Van Wilder is regardless proud of the team's performance. "You can't forget: it was the first Tour for many riders, I'm a young rider and I don't think it's fair that we're compared to a team like UAE Emirates. They're guys who can also ride top 5 in a Grand Tour. That's not a relevant comparison."
Place comments
0 Comments
You are currently seeing only the comments you are notified about, if you want to see all comments from this post, click the button below.
Show all comments