Soudal-QuickStep’s challenging Tour de France saw an abrupt turnaround in fortunes on stage 18 when Kasper Asgreen claimed a victory that simultaneously silenced his team’s critics and provided the Dane confirmation, at the highest level possible, that after a year battling injuries, he was back in top condition.
Three weeks ago when Asgreen became Danish time trial national champion, his first win in nearly 12 months, the former Tour of Flanders champion already called that victory “more special than others, because I had to fight and work hard in the last year to come back to my level”.
But that triumph was completely eclipsed by the 28-year-old’s first-ever Grand Tour stage win on Thursday, taken against all the odds after a day-long break that only just escaped the peloton’s clutches at Bourg-en-Bresse.
As chance would have it, Tour de France finishes in Bourg-en-Bresse have previously smiled on Soudal-QuickStep, with the previous winner in the French town being back in 2007 with Tom Boonen, a longstanding star of the Belgian team and, like Asgreen, also a Classics specialist.
Now 16 years further on, though, the boot was on the other foot. Rather than the stage being decided in a sprint like when Boonen won, Asgreen and his three breakaway companions somehow both kept the peloton at bay by the bare minimum. Furthemore and unlike in 2007 where QuickStep blasted to three stage wins and the green jersey classification, it simultaneously provided the Belgian team with a much-needed first victory in the 2023 Tour.
“Obviously it’s important for a team like ours to come away with a victory, we have a long history of doing that,” Asgreen said. “I don’t know how long it’s been since we didn’t get at least one victory in the Tour, so I’m very happy not this year that’s not going to happen.
“I knew there was a chance, and without Fabio Jakobsen here” - the Soudal-QuickStep sprinter who quit the race after a long battle against crash injuries - “we’ve all been really motivated to do something. I’m just really happy it worked out.”
On such a rolling course, Asgreen’s time trialling skills were obviously crucial to the move finally succeeding. But the Dane paid tribute to all the riders in the break, which including another well-known TT specialist, Victor Campenaerts (Lotto-Soudal), the Belgian’s teammate Pascal Eenkhoorn and Uno-X Tour debutant Jonas Abrahamsen.
“It was a team time trial, we couldn’t have done it without the three others. We all deserved to win with the work we did but I‘m glad I did it,” he said. “I’ve been on the other end of stages like this quite a few times. It wasn’t ideal with four, six or seven or eight would be ideal, but it’s not the first time a small group of escapees can manage a victory like this in the last week of the Tour.
“We didn’t speak at all out there. Everybody just committed. There was an understanding that if this had to work out, we couldn’t start looking at each other. We had to put everything into it, and if we all did that, then we could get away with the victory today.”
With less than a 20-second advantage at 15 kilometres to go, it was touch and go all the way and Asgreen said that he only began to think the victory was possible with one kilometre left to race.
“In the last 10 kilometres our time was coming down pretty fast. At one kilometre to go I swung off, but Victor came to the front and upped the pace to do the leadout for Eenkhoorn. That’s when I believed it was possible.”
The 2023 Tour is ending very differently for Asgreen compared to 2022 when he was a DNS on stage 9, suffering from the effects of a knee injury incurred in the Tour de Suisse, and then had to forsake racing completely for the rest of the year with chronic fatigue syndrome. A long break in the Volta ao Algarve this February did not end with victory but at least rewarded him with a mountains classification and perhaps the first in-race sign that he was heading back on track, but he told journalists on Thursday it was only after Paris-Roubaix that he began to feel he was back to normal. Victory in stage 18 of the Tour, though, proved it to the world at large.
“It means so much to me, after the period I’ve had with a crash in the Tour de Suisse then then having to leave the Tour last year,” he said.
“I’ve come a long way through this, and to be able to cap it off with a victory - I want to dedicate it to all the people who helped me, and to all my teammates, but particularly Dries [Devenyns, retiring this season - Ed.] as this is his last Tour. He was really emotional, so this is for him, and his wife and all the people who helped me this year.
“All this last year, since leaving the Tour has been quite tough,” Asgreen remarked. “This victory proves I’m back where I belong.”
