Jonas Vingegaard retained his overall lead in the Tour de France as Soudal Quick-Step’s Kasper Asgreen won stage 18 in Bourg-en-Bresse. Asgreen was one of four riders in the day’s breakaway to survive a thrilling pursuit by the speeding peloton, as the race left the Alps behind and entered the Rhone valley.
The four-rider attack, composed of Asgreen, Jonas Abrahamsen of Uno-X and the Lotto Dstny pair of Victor Campenaerts and Pascal Eenkhoorn, joined forces with 50km to race and maintained a slim lead into the closing moments of the stage.
Racing at more than 60km/h, the quartet entered the final kilometre with only six seconds’ advantage on their chasers, yet Campenaerts’s time-trialling power kept the group ahead. Asgreen’s last-gasp acceleration to the line was enough to hold off the sprinter Jasper Philipsen, already the winner of four stages, and his Alpecin-Deceuninck team.
Asgreen was generous in victory and praised his breakaway companions. “I really couldn’t have done it without Pascal, Victor and Jonas,” he said. “We all deserved to win with the work we put out there.”
Asgreen, a former winner of the Tour of Flanders, was making a return to form after struggling for more than a year. “It means so much,” he said. “With the period I had the last year, with my crash in the Tour of Switzerland, and having to leave the Tour de France last year ... I’ve come a long way.”
Meanwhile, after his exploits in the Alps, Vingegaard enjoyed a relatively uneventful day, although his Jumbo-Visma squad lost Wout van Aert, one of his key teammates. The Belgian left the race to be with his wife, who is expected to give birth within the next few days.
“It’s not a dilemma,” the Belgian rider said. “It’s an easy decision. I always thought that I would go home when my wife indicated she needed me. That time has come.”
As Van Aert left the race, the scrutiny of his team leader continued with Olivier Banuls, head of the cycling unit at the International Testing Agency, (ITA) telling Reuters that performance had been taken into account when targeting Vingegaard for testing.
“Performance is one of the criteria and obviously Vingegaard’s performance is one of them for us, so he is obviously targeted in particular,” Banuls said. “There are also other criteria for riders, such as biological passports or information we get from our Intelligence and Investigation Unit.”
Banuls revealed that Vingegaard, who leads Tadej Pogacar by seven minutes and 35 seconds, has been tested 18 times during the Tour and was also tested eight times in June, both in and out of competition.
Compared with Pogacar, who raced throughout much of the spring until he fractured his wrist in April, much of the Dane’s title defence was founded on a series of training camps at altitude.
“We have different places,” he said of the camps, “so in February we go to Tenerife, to Teide. In May, we go to Sierra Nevada and in June we went to Tignes.”
Pogacar’s partner, Urska Zigart, meanwhile, revealed that the Slovenian had nearly quit the Tour after the fifth stage, when he learned that she had crashed while racing in the Giro Donne in Italy.
“He called me to ask how I was and then, when I told him I hadn’t finished the race and had crashed, he said he was coming home,” she said. “I said: ‘No you’re not, it’s the Tour.’”
Pogacar, whose Tour challenge collapsed dramatically in Wednesday’s stage to Courchevel, said he had recovered “a bit” from the experience.
“The start [on Thursday] was pretty hard and quite – not emotional – but just a lot of guys came and spoke to me,” he said. “Thanks to all the riders. They cheered me up.”
