Adam Yates held on to his overall lead in the Tour de France after he safely negotiated a tense second stage, the longest of the 2023 Tour, from Vitoria-Gasteiz to San Sebastián, won by the French rider Victor Lafay.
Lafay, already the surprise package of the opening stages, took his Cofidis team’s first Tour success for 15 years after breaking clear of the race favourites in the final kilometre of the stage.
The 27‑year‑old from Lyon, now fourth overall and already one of the best performers in the first stage to Bilbao on Saturday, frustrated the best-laid plans of Jumbo-Visma’s bitterly disappointed Wout van Aert.
“I just went out there and did everything I could,” Lafay said. “Yesterday I was a bit frustrated, but today, to be there at the end, that’s amazing. I knew there would be attacks towards the end and I thought I could do something. I just said to myself: ‘Go for it.’”
But the stage was disrupted by fans scattering tacks across the race route with up to 20 to 25 riders believed to have punctured. The French rider Lilian Calmejane was one of those to post images of tacks embedded in punctured tyres after he had crossed the finish line.
“Someone sprayed some tacks on the road because we saw 15-20 punctures,” Matt White, the Jayco AlUla team’s head of performance, said. “Some punctured immediately and some rode through with a slow leak. It’s a shame. We’re lucky that Simon Yates didn’t puncture, but there were a lot of guys puncturing at an important time in the race.”
As in the opening stage to Bilbao on Saturday, a select group including the UAE Emirates leader, Tadej Pogacar, and the overnight race leader, Yates, locked horns with defending champion, Jonas Vingegaard, towards the top of the final climb, the Jaizkibel.
Mindful of how close his rivalry with the Jumbo-Visma leader, Vingegaard, might be, Pogacar targeted the eight‑second bonus available and after winning the sprint to the top against the 2022 champion and extending his margin over him to 11sec, he then accelerated into the mist‑shrouded descent with the Dane in his slipstream. But Vingegaard, aware his teammate Van Aert was in hot pursuit in the group behind, refused to assist the Slovenian and they were reeled in by their pursuers with 12km to race.
Although several riders, including Adam Yates’s UAE Emirates teammate Matteo Trentin, crashed in conditions that ranged from sunshine to showers, the Lancastrian was relieved to retain the race lead.
“There was a lot of stress in the bunch, wet roads and a lot of road furniture,” he said. “We had a little bit of bad luck with Matteo crashing. In the end we set up Tadej for the bonus seconds and in the final, I think we did a good job. Tomorrow’s a little easier on paper, but you never know with the Tour. Every day is super‑hard, super-technical, it’s not just easy to go to the finish and keep yellow. We’ll see what happens.”
The main break of the day was animated by the American Neilson Powless of the EF Education EasyPost team, a past winner of the San Sebastián Classic, and the Norwegian veteran Edvald Boasson Hagen, of the TotalEnergies team.
But as the pair entered the final 40km Boasson Hagen faded and Powless pursued the move alone. Eventually, though, the rapidly gaining peloton led by Vingegaard’s Jumbo-Visma team chewed him up and spat him out, well before the top of the Jaizkibel.
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It was a better day for the Ineos Grenadiers team, with Tom Pidcock taking fourth in the sprint and Egan Bernal in the front group at the finish, although the British team do not yet have any riders placed in the top 10.
It was another tough day, however, for Mark Cavendish who was again distanced by the succession of short sharp climbs. The 38‑year‑old, now with the Astana Qazaqstan team, is hoping for better in the expected sprint finish in Bayonne on Monday.
“Hopefully it is [a sprint],” Cavendish said. “They ride hard on the climbs to control it [the race]. They just look at the numbers. All the sprinters are on the back saying: ‘Calm down!’ Hopefully we can have a nice bunch sprint.”
