"To predict it would have been…imaginative." Standing next to a team car on an anonymous side road a few hundred metres away from the finish line at Alpe d'Huez with the noise of fans cheering stage winner Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) and all the other top riders in the distant background, the Ecuadorian's head DS, Charly Wegelius, is taking his time to find the right word to sum up Carapaz's victory. But that's perhaps only logical.
It's true that any stage win, be it as widely expected as a Tadej Pogačar mountain-top solo or a Remco Evenepoel time trial, quite apart from the performance itself, there's always a lengthy mix of reasons to take into account.
