Ten men in Foix, and a Tour turned inside out
Mads Pedersen won stage 4 of the Tour in a ten-man sprint at Foix, Quinn Simmons made it a Lidl-Trek one-two, and none of that is the story. The story is further down the results sheet, where the general classification got up, shook itself and put its clothes back on in the wrong order.
Torstein Træen is the maillot jaune. Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard, first and second when the stage rolled out of Carcassonne, are now fourth and fifth at 7:53.
Read that gap again. Not fifty-three seconds. Seven minutes and fifty-three.
The road south said a hard day was possible: 181.9 km into the Ariège with 2,784 metres of climbing packed into it. The average speed says it actually happened. The winners covered the day at a shade over 43.5 km/h, which across that much vertical is a race being ridden to hurt people from a long way out. By Foix the front of the race was down to ten, and the ten make interesting reading. Three from Lidl-Trek: Pedersen, Simmons and Mathias Vacek. Two from Movistar: Raúl García Pierna, third on the stage, and Pablo Castrillo. Then Marco Frigo, Ramses Debruyne, Kévin Vauquelin, Sean Quinn and Træen. Not a sprinter’s selection. A group with plans.
Pedersen took the sprint and the ten bonus seconds that came with it, Simmons collected six, García Pierna four. And then the recalculations started.
Træen began the day 24th overall. He finished it in yellow, level on time with Quinn, who climbed 24 places of his own to sit second. Vacek jumped 28 spots to third at 3:50. Remco Evenepoel wasn’t in the front ten and still rose 31 places, to sixth at 8:06, which tells you how expensive the day was for everyone who missed the move. Pogačar and Vingegaard dropped three places each and now sit 7:53 down, with Evenepoel just thirteen seconds behind them.
On stage 4. Of a Tour everyone had pencilled in as a two-man argument.
However the split happened, the outcome is a verdict. UAE Team Emirates and Visma | Lease a Bike are built, at vast expense, to control exactly this sort of stage, and between them they allowed a group containing the next race leader to disappear up the road and stay gone. You can debate whose responsibility the chase was. That debate is precisely how gaps like this one are born, and both teams have three weeks to think about it. Isaac del Toro slipping to eighth at 8:17 only sharpens the bill for UAE, who also fell from first to fourth in the teams classification.
Lidl-Trek, meanwhile, had the kind of day teams write annual reports about. The stage win. Second place. Three riders in the front ten. Pedersen’s points lead now stands at 103, which is more than Pogačar’s 55 and Vingegaard’s 44 combined. Vacek took over the white jersey, 4:16 ahead of Debruyne, and sits third overall. And the team moved to the top of the teams classification for good measure. The only jersey that didn’t move was Alex Baudin’s polka dots, safe on 12 points after a day when the mountains competition was the least dramatic thing on the road.
Which leaves the new order. A Uno-X rider in yellow, an EF rider level with him on time, and a 22-year-old… no, let’s stay with what the table says: a top three, Træen, Quinn, Vacek, that nobody outside their team buses predicted on Monday, and the two best stage racers of their generation nearly eight minutes adrift before the race has properly reached the mountains.
The lead is zero seconds. Bonus sprints just became the most valuable real estate in France.
And Pogačar and Vingegaard, for the first time in years, get to find out what the race looks like from the other end of a deficit. It tends to make people do interesting things.