Wheel change at the Tour de France. This is an official notice to all sprinters that from this day forth, if you want to have any chance of winning the stage, you’ll skip Fernando Gaviria’s wheel and make an immediate switch.
The wheel you want, in that final 500 meters, as the sprinters bump and careen across the road, the finish line just seconds ahead, the wheel that might pull you to victory, the wheel that everyone will fight for, belongs to Dylan Groenewegen (LottoNL-Jumbo).
For the second day in a row, he ripped past Fernando Gaviria (Quickstep) and Peter Sagan (Bora Hansgrohe) and Andre Greipel (Lotto Soudal) like they were missing a few hundred watts. In the crazy sprint into Amiens, Groenewegen showed confidence, patience, good instincts and most of all, blistering speed.
“The legs are better every day,” said Groenewegen, post stage. “Today it was a fast final with a lot of corners but the team did an amazing job and my position was good and I saw Gaviria and Greipel were fighting for position. I saw the finish and thought ‘this is the moment.’ It was a hectic final, but that’s every day in the Tour.”
It was a surprise that nobody crashed in what was a chaotic scramble for the line. Greipel took the left side of the barrier and shut the door on Gaviria, who had head-butted the German in an effort to gain position. For his part, Griepel had banged bodies with Nikias Arndt (Team Sunweb) in the final kilometer.
Both would be relegated by the judges — which ticked off Greipel and put a serious dent in Gaviria’s battle for the green jersey with Peter Sagan. The penalty pushed the Slovakian from fourth to second, with the obvious jump in points while the Colombian lost out completely. Sagan now has a lead of 63 points.
While the Tour can be a pressure cooker for an inexperienced rider, the young Dutchman is having a bang-up time. “The first days [of the Tour] were not what I expected,” he said. “But the last two days were very good with the two wins, so I like that.”
Groenewegen, Sagan and Gaviria now all have two victories in Le Grand Shindig. If we had to pick one of them to win on the Champs Elysees on the final day in Paris, the money goes down on the guy in the yellow and black of LottoNL-Jumbo.
We’re sure that after today in Amiens, everybody got the new message. The wheel you want belongs to Groenewegen.
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