Mark Cavendish’s imminent retirement is a reminder that the sprint hierarchy in the Tour de France is an ever-changing picture. So, too, the fate of the Irishman Sam Bennett, who looked unassailable after winning two stages and the points prize in the 2020 race, but has not even started the Tour since, thanks to injury and team politics.
Bennett was at least racing and winning this week, but a pair of stages in Romania’s Sibiu Tour will be scant consolation; it remains to be seen whether and when Cavendish will race again after breaking his collarbone last Saturday.
Even before Cavendish left the Tour a week ago, it was obvious who was the new No 1 sprinter in the Tour pack. In the first week Jasper Philipsen won three stages, a clean sweep of the race’s flat finishes. On Wednesday in Moulins he added another, meaning that if his victories in stages 15 and 21 of the 2022 race are taken into account, he has not been headed in the last six blanket finishes in 2022 and 2023.
The departure on Thursday and Friday of the prolific Dutch sprinter Fabio Jakobsen and Australia’s former ace Caleb Ewan merely reinforced the sense of the 25-year-old Belgian’s superiority. Jakobsen has not tasted Tour success since stage two of last year’s race, while Ewan’s last Tour stage win came in 2020. It was also clear by this weekend that, barring anything untoward, Philipsen would take the 2023 green points winner’s jersey in Paris.
This is all a far cry from events early in the 2022 Tour, when Philipsen was clearly frustrated by the fact he had finished second or third eight times in Tour stages. Frustrated and embarrassed by his display at Calais on stage four, when he finished second to Wout van Aert, but was unaware that his fellow Belgian had finished alone to take the stage; Philipsen’s ecstatic victory salute left him in a grizzly mood, as those who watched the recent Netflix series on the 2022 race will be well aware.
At this point his nickname “Jasper disaster”, for his accident-prone ways, looked amply merited, and the frustration of the management team at the Alpecin-Deceuninck team was only too obvious. In contrast, Van Aert has huffed and puffed at every sprint finish in the first two weeks of the Tour, and has signally failed to blow anything down.
Philipsen is now the most successful Tour sprinter since Cavendish, the last man to win four stages in a single Tour, and he has two, possibly three remaining chances of pushing that unbeaten record further in the next week, although the extremely mountainous profile of this year’s Tour unfortunately means there is no chance of his equalling the absolute record of eight stage victories in a single Tour held by Charles Pélissier, Eddy Merckx and Freddy Maertens.
There are various factors in Philipsen’s rise. The departure of his fellow Belgian fastman Tim Merlier for the Soudal-Quickstep team has cleared his way within the Alpecin squad.
It has taken him time to find his feet at the Dutch team after arriving there in 2021, when initially at the Tour he was working as Merlier’s lead-out man. It is only this year that his partnership with Alpecin’s leader, Mathieu van der Poel, has truly blossomed. At the Paris- Roubaix Classic in April, it was Philipsen who monitored the chase group as Van der Poel rode to his biggest ever win. At this year’s Tour, the Dutchman has given a whole new dimension to Tour sprinting with his explosive acceleration providing the perfect foil for Philipsen as long as the Belgian is in his wake.
There have, however, been questions about Van der Poel’s robust style in the final kilometre, even in a cycling subdiscipline where the safety envelope is always stretched to its limit. Philipsen has received a welter of negative messages on social media from fans of Cavendish and Biniam Girmay, convinced that he and Van der Poel have been going just a little too far, although to date the referees’ only response has been a slap on the wrist for Van der Poel after he shunted Girmay aside on stage four.
Like the biggest current star in Belgian cycling, Remco Evenepoel, Philipsen began his sporting life as a football player, until a BMX injury forced him to seek out other avenues. Belgian cycling being the small world it is, he shares a home town, Mol, with a superstar of the past, Tom Boonen, with whom he would go for coffee rides early in his career.
He has now equalled Boonen’s career total of six Tour stages, and should emulate his green jersey of 2007. The question now is whether he can broaden his register, as Boonen did – and Maertens did 30 years before Boonen – and build on his second place to Van der Poel at Roubaix to shine in the one-day Classics that mean so much in Flemish cycling.
Behind Philipsen, the next sprint sensation also looks set to come from the Low Countries. Dutch rider Olav Kooij is slated to make his Grand Tour debut next year for Jumbo-Visma. Only 21, Kooij was barely out of the junior ranks when his contract with Jumbo’s World Tour team was confirmed in 2021. Last year, he was already picking up stage and overall titles in second-tier events, and this year he has gone up a level with stage wins at Paris-Nice and the Four Days of Dunkirk.
If there is one consolation for this generation of sprint stars, Kooij’s chances of riding the Tour in the immediate future look slender, with Jumbo-Visma fully committed to backing Jonas Vingegaard, and thus lacking space for a sprinter. There was even speculation that he would leave the Dutch squad, but this was stymied when he signed a two-year deal this spring.
For the foreseeable future then, the Tour sprints belong to Philipsen, but this is a fast-moving business, in every sense. Who knows how long the Belgian’s dominance will last?
