While usually the game of cat and mouse in the final kilometres of a flat stage of the Tour de France between pursuers and pursued is clearcut there are times when the way the chasing peloton lets its elected victims believe in the chance of victory before dashing their hopes can seem acutely sadistic. Alexander Kristoff's win here, his second of the Tour, was one of those times.
In the shadow of the Roman Arena Jack Bauer and Martin Elmiger made a doomed attempt to win the stage in a finish redolent of a pair of gladiators being put to the sword after being given the thumbs up. After spending every pedal turn of the 222km stage – the third longest of the race – in front, all of seven pedal revolutions separated Bauer from the finish line when Kristoff swept past him with less than 25 metres to the line.
For once the sprinters’ teams miscalculated the chase but after two stages through the Alps and a surprisingly tough run across the south of France they could be forgiven for having stiff legs. Behind Bauer and Elmiger, the Swiss national champion, the pursuit was mainly led by André Greipel’s Lotto and Kristoff’s Katusha, including his lead-out man, Luca Paolini, whose fearsome beard has earned him the nickname barbone, the tramp. Marcel Kittel’s Giants kept a largely watching brief and at the bitter end the peloton seemed to have a distinct lack of firepower.
Either Bauer or Elmiger would have merited the win. Bauer’s Garmin-Sharp team are gathering what crumbs they can after their leader Andrew Talansky was forced to pull out after a series of crashes; Elmiger is a member of the Swiss team IAM, sponsored by a finance company, who are riding their first Tour and, like Garmin, have nothing to show for two weeks’ hard work as yet.
But at least their sprinter Heinrich Haussler finished best of the rest behind Kristoff. It was different for Bauer. He had left Elmiger for dead with 100m to go and was clearly within reach of New Zealand’s first ever individual stage win in the Tour – Kiwis have twice been part of squads that have won team time-trial stages – when Kristoff and the others came haring past. Understandably he collapsed in tears afterwards.
Kristoff’s win in itself indicates quite how tough this Tour is becoming. Since taking the bronze medal in the London Olympic Games behind Alexandr Vinokourov and Rigoberto Urán, the 27-year-old, born in Oslo, raised in Stavanger, has quietly been building a fine curriculum vitae after coming through the ranks of the Continental Tour teams Glud & Marstrand and Maxbo-Bianchi.
Last year his biggest victory was a stage of the Tour of Switzerland but he was in the hunt in some of the most difficult one-day Classics on the calendar: the Tour of Flanders, Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix, placing fourth, eighth and ninth respectively. This has been his best season, with a dozen wins, most importantly Milan-San Remo, but the manner in which he took Italy’s “Classic of Classics” explains in part how here he finished in front of riders who are faster on paper: Kittel, Greipel and Bryan Coquard, not to mention Peter Sagan, whose third place was a frustrating ninth top-five finish in the last two and a bit winless weeks.
Milan-San Remo is the longest Classic and this year it was horribly wet and cold, and the usual hectic cut and thrust in the final kilometres cut the lead group down to just 27. Similarly, when Kristoff took his first Tour stage in Saint-Etienne on Thursday, it came at the end of a day of ups and downs, if in searing heat. Rather than a pure speedster, the Norwegian functions best when the hills, the distance and the pace blunt the other sprinters’ legs. Haussler, a stage winner in 2009, is another of the breed – making him a mite slower than Norway’s previous sprint star Thor Hushovd, who retires at the end of this year.
Into Nîmes should have been a straightforward run out of the mountains and across the Camargue flatlands but turned into a stage that suited Kristoff rather than Kittel. Fitting the pattern since the race left Leeds, it resembled a one-day Classic not a transitional stage of the Tour. The weather gods have done their worst these past few days, with heavy rain, cold and blazing heat, and they twisted the knife again with apocalyptic skies, strong winds and torrential showers so that at times the finale was more Belgium than the Bouches-du-Rhône.
The pace being set as the peloton chased Elmiger and Bauer began to tell on the weaker elements 80km out; they included Richie Porte, who finished 16 seconds behind the peloton after being cut briefly adrift, and the mountains leader Joaquim Rodríguez, part of a little group who rode in 12 minutes behind. There was sufficient skirmishing to suggest that, if some of the teams had been minded, severe damage could have been done. Romain Bardet’s Ag2R-La Mondiale team briefly pushed up the pace with 60km remaining and Tejay van Garderen’s BMC made a more overt attempt to shred the field when Ag2R desisted.
As five of Van Garderen's red-clad team-mates drove at the front, Vincenzo Nibali could be seen springing into their slipstream, with the languid ease that marks his every action on a bike at present. Nibali's intervention seemed to calm matters down a little but the halt and the lame were popping out of the back of the peloton in twos and threes all the way into Nîmes. Simon Yates, one of two British riders to contest Sunday's stage, abandoned according to plan after a fine maiden fortnight at the tour.
On Monday the riders rest in and around Carcassonne. On Tuesday, after what seems like an indecently brief 48 hours without climbing, the Pyrenees loom into view.
Guardian Service
