Jasper Philipsen of the Alpecin Deceuninck team won stage 16 of the Tour de France, from Gruissan to Nimes, claiming his third success in this year’s race. The Belgian sprinter again benefited from a near-perfect lead-out from his teammate, and the world road race champion, Matthieu van der Poel.
As Philipsen celebrated, however, his fellow sprinter Biniam Girmay, who leads the points classification, was climbing gingerly to his feet, after crashing badly, with a kilometre and a half still to race. The Eritrean, riding for the Intermarche Wanty team, was clearly in some pain as he crossed the finish line.
With Girmay failing to score any points and Philipsen racking up 100, the gap between the pair in the points classification has now narrowed to 32 points, with just five stages remaining.
“He’s climbing really well,” Philpsen said of Girmay. “I just hope he’s okay after the crash, because he doesn’t deserve to lose like this. But I’ll just try whatever we can, because the hard stages are yet to come.”
In what was his last-ever sprint finish in the Tour, Mark Cavendish finished 17th, after losing contact with his team in the multiple sweeping bends leading into the finish.
On a hot languid afternoon, with temperatures climbing into the mid-30s, the peloton took things easy, racing at a steady tempo through the furnace conditions of the Herault and Gard, accompanied by a chorus of cicadas.
Only as the peloton entered the suburbs of the old Roman city, did the speed increase as the sprinters awoke to the fact that, with climbing now dominating the denouement of this year’s Tour, this was their final opportunity to take a stage.
Meanwhile, the repercussions of the seismic performances in the Pyrenees, by both race leader Tadej Pogacar, of UAE Team Emirates, and defending champion, Jonas Vingegaard, continue, as the cycling world comes to terms with witnessing the fastest-ever rides in the history of mountain racing.
“Sunday I was better than I have ever been before,” Vingegaard said of his performance in the stage to Plateau de Beille, which was won by Pogacar. “These are probably the two best performances on a mountain in the history of cycling,” he said.
Vingegaard, of the Visma Lease-a-bike team, has also confirmed to the Danish media that he uses a device, that allows precise doses of carbon monoxide into the lungs, to measure the benefits of altitude training.
Vingegaard went to Tignes ski station in the French Alps, at 1,810 metres of altitude, from 27 May to 3 June. His team have been training at altitude in Tignes for the past six years.
Speaking in Danish to the Politiken newspaper, Vingegaard confirmed that he has used the device, but he did not specify when he had used it. “It’s to measure how much haemoglobin you have in your blood,” the 2022 and 2023 Tour champion said.
Vingegaard said that the carbon monoxide technique, currently legal, “is not something that is dangerous” and added that his medical team “say that they send something into the lungs that is similar to smoking a cigarette”.
He said: “There is nothing suspicious about it. We measure how many red blood cells you have in your blood and the effect of altitude training camp.
“We measure the day we get to altitude and then the day we go back down. Then we see the difference in how much haemoglobin is built up. There is nothing more to it.”
Vingegaard has always denied any performance enhancement, legal or otherwise. “I can tell from my heart that I don’t take anything,” he said in July 2023. “I don’t take anything I would not give to my daughter.”
Asked by the Guardian if he was familiar with the technique that Vingegaard had been using, Pogacar said: “When I heard this, I was thinking about car exhausts. I don’t know about that much, so I have no comment. I don’t know what it is. I was thinking it’s what goes out from the exhausts from the car, so maybe I’m just uneducated.”
The 17th stage on Wednesday takes the peloton from Saint-Paul-Trois-Chateaux to Superdevoluy mountain resort, overlooking Gap. With three categorised climbs coming in the final 30km, it is unlikely that any of the peloton will be breathing easy.
