Foix – what a scorcher!
Carlton Kirby (not his finest hour)
News from the medical car
Five riders did not start Stage 16 (several Covid positive tests) leaving AG2R Citroën with just 3 out of 8 riders for the third week. The withdrawals of Lennard Kämna and Jakob Fuglsang reduce four of our minileague teams. Specially bad luck for Don`t Lube your gears with porridge and Le tour for sure. The former limps on with just 5 riders left while the latter seems to be doing just fine with only 5.
Marc Soler, another of UAE’s diminished team must be unwell or injured too to trail in 170 km with only the broom wagon for company, only to miss the time cut. Double ouch.
attack attack attack
was the order of the day for Pogacar, team or no team around him. But Vingegaard was equal to it each time, while others fell away in their wake. But several minutes ahead of them a huge break stayed away (as predicted all along) all of whom were bested by a wonderful solo effort by the emotional Hugo Houle, paying tribute to his late brother who had been killed by a hit-and-run drunk driver 10 years before. What a way to celebrate the Canadian’s first professional road stage win. Chapeau!
Team of the Day
And congratulations to Team Ciclominaccia heading the daily veloscores for the third time.
Stat du Jour
Postcard from Ariège
mardi seize juillet Foix
From the superb medieval city of Carcassonee the race heads to Foix, which as well as sounding like a Boris the Convict impression, is capital of Ariège and also close to the border with Andorra. So today and the following ones in the Pyrenees feature some of the very nice postage stamps from the diarchy of Andorra. This one celebrates the 2009 Tour which popped into Spain, Andorra and Switzerland, concluding with a Mr Armstrong since disqualified in 3rd on GC, headed by the of-course-squeeky-clean Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck. Do the harlequin colours mean that they took us all for clowns until WADA caught up with all three of them? That was also the year that Mark Cavendish won 6 stages but somehow did not win the green jersey?!