Chaos reigned in the Hell of the North as the fifth stage of the Tour de France hit the dreaded cobbled roads of the Franco-Belgian border, with crashes, punctures and panic, plus a stray hay bale, giving the defending champion Tadej Pogacar the upper hand after a frenzied day of racing.
With Jumbo-Visma’s leader Primoz Roglic spreadeagled on the road, the Slovenian double Tour winner made hay after his compatriot had been taken down by a roadside bale, designed to steer the riders safely through a roundabout. Even the seemingly super-powered Wout van Aert, winner of stage four, crashed, and was called on to try and help his embattled team leaders, Roglic and Jonas Vingegaard, recover lost ground.
Van Aert’s efforts were enough to pull Vingegaard back to the front, but not Roglic, who lost more than two minutes to the UAE Emirates rider. “Just a shit day,” Van Aert said succinctly, even though he did enough to hang on to the race leader’s yellow jersey.
“It was difficult to fight for position again and to throw myself back in the mix,” he said of his own crash. “But when we had to chase hard, I felt my legs coming good again. I was not in a position to ride with the best so for me it was an easy decision to commit to the team work and to minimise the damage.”
The Belgian somehow managed to restrict Vingegaard’s losses, towing the young Dane along in pursuit of Pogacar to limit his deficit to just 21 seconds on the overall standings. Roglic, however, who popped his own shoulder back in after dislocating it in the crash and is over two minutes behind the defending champion, has a seemingly impossible task.
Vingegaard, now likely to be his team’s main man as the race heads towards Friday’s first summit finish at Super Planche des Belles Filles, admitted that he “panicked a little bit”. “Everyone was nervous,” Vingegaard said. “Everyone took a lot of chances and it was stressful. It’s not good to lose time, but I’m confident in my shape and confident I can do something good when we get to the mountains.”
In stark contrast, Pogacar flew through the heat and dust, riding at the front of the main peloton through all 11 of the cobbled sections and, partnered by the Belgian Classics specialist Jasper Stuyven (Trek Segafredo), an expert on the ruptured farm tracks, closed on the five-man breakaway that included the eventual stage winner Simon Clarke (Israel-Premier Tech). “I have to buy him a beer,” Pogacar said of Stuyven’s efforts afterwards.
But on the approach to the finish, even Pogacar’s effort wilted a little, allowing his pursuers to close the gap and turning Jumbo-Visma’s nightmare scenario into just a bad dream. Ineos Grenadiers exited the cobbles in decent shape, despite Geraint Thomas crashing in the group that fell with Roglic. “Performance-wise, the guys were pretty good,” their team manager, Rod Ellingworth, said.
“It wasn’t how we wanted the day to go, because we wanted to take it on. But in fact we rode pretty well as a group. Geraint went down in the hay bale crash, but he’s fine and only took a bit of skin off his hands. You look at what happened to Jumbo-Visma and we’d take what happened to us.”
Like many teams, Ineos Grenadiers, with four riders within a minute of Pogacar, are drawing a line under what have been labelled the “wacky races” stages of this year’s Tour, as the first mountain stages loom this weekend. “Now the race starts, the normal road racing,” Ellingworth said. “The race will settle down and I think we’re still in the running.”
Thursday’s sixth stage, the longest of this year’s Tour at 219.9km, takes the convoy south to Longwy in the Meurthe-Moselle, as a prelude to Friday’s first summit finish at Super Planche des Belles Filles, location of Pogacar’s infamous last-minute dethroning of Roglic in 2020.
