Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) sprinted to his third stage win of the Tour de France, dominating the closing sprint of stage 16 in Nîmes as green jersey Biniam Girmay (Intermarché-Wanty) crashed in the final 2km.
The Belgian eased to his ninth career Tour stage win ahead of Phil Bauhaus (Bahrain Victorious) and Alexander Kristoff (Uno-X Mobility) to draw a close to one of the dullest days of this year’s race.
With Girmay falling before the finish and Philipsen gaining 50 points at the line, the battle for the green jersey now appears to be back on, despite the stage being the last of the flat finishes at the Tour. The Eritrean’s lead is now reduced to just 32 points.
Philipsen benefitted from another quality lead-out from his Alpecin-Deceuninck teammates as world champion Mathieu van der Poel dropped him off in a perfect position to start the sprint from the front.
The Dutchman took over from the Uno-X lead-out, launching Philipsen towards the line, where he took a clear win well ahead of his competitors.
“I’m really happy. Definitely after such a team effort – it’s always nice when you can win together and I think that’s what we did definitely today,” Philipsen said later.
“I was feeling good. I had a good rest day and I’ve felt that my shape has improved during this Tour de France so I was confident if we could line it up good today that we could go for the win.
“Every stage win is really hard to get at this level so to take three is a really good job and I think we can be proud.
“Everything is possible but it’s really hard,” he added, referring to the green jersey battle. “[Girmay] is climbing really well. I just hope he’s OK after the crash because he doesn’t deserve to lose like this. We’ll just try whatever we can, but hard stages are yet to come. We have to go day-by-day but we mostly enjoy this win.”
Unsurprisingly, there was no movement in the general classification as Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) finished in the peloton, retaining his overall lead, 3:34 up on Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike).
How it unfolded
Stage 16 of the Tour de France would deliver the final opportunity for the sprinters of the Tour de France peloton to shine. The day would take the 150 riders remaining in the race on yet another blandly designed flat stage, this time stretching out a drawn-out 188.6km from Gruissan to Nîmes, curving around Montpellier on the way.
The largely featureless day brought just one categorised climb. The 1.2km, 5% Côte de Fambetou lay 76km from the finish, far too distant to have any real effect on the action, while an earlier uncategorised 7km climb to the Mas de Cornon led the riders into the day’s sole intermediate sprint at Les Matellettes.
With so little on offer for any potential breakaway, almost half the teams in the peloton interested in a bunch sprint finish, and local temperatures reaching into the mid-30s, there was – as we’ve seen several times before in this Tour – no incentive for anybody to venture up the road.
Two hours ticked by with literally nothing at all happening out on the road, the peloton averaging 41.5 kph as they hit the final 100km of the stage.
Things briefly burst into life once the race reached the sprint and the fastmen came to the fore, though sadly for viewers it was only the intermediate sprint with 93km still left to run. Bryan Coquard outpaced Jasper Philipsen to the line, with green jersey Biniam Girmay getting caught behind on the way to fourth place.
Thomas Gachinard (TotalEnergies) pushed on alone after the sprint while behind him the peloton settled back into the dull roll-along of the previous hours. The Frenchman rode two minutes up the road as the sprint squad Alpecin-Deceuninck and Jayco-AlUla controlled things back in the peloton.
The threat of crosswinds had been mooted ahead of, and even during, the stage. Any strong winds would have been more than welcome to add a touch of spice to proceedings, but none materialised, and so the sprint squads continued on, gradually clawing back Gachinard on the road to Nîmes.
He lasted until the 25km mark, by which point the sprinter’s teams had already upped the pace ahead of the finish. The likes of Astana Qazaqstan, Lotto-Dstny, and Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale all took to the front inside the final 10km, with Uno-X Mobility also joining the party later on.
Alpecin-Deceuninck moved up with 2km to go, the Belgian team following others during the final run-in and shielding Philipsen from the wind in the process on the way to the final sprint finish of the 2024 Tour.
Results
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