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Tour de France Tour de France 2022: Stage 5 (Lille Métropole – Arenberg Porte du Hainaut, 157k)

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Wasn't it a mistake from Pogacar to attack in hindsight? He gained 13 seconds on Vingegaard eventually. The group were at roughly a minute from Vingegaard & Co when the Slovenian made his move. Actually the gap might have ballooned to about 2 minutes if Pogacar had ridden tempo with Arkea, BORA & FDJ instead of moving away.

In hindsight, maybe. But in the heat of the battle, he had intentions to bury his rivals in a cloud of French dust. I admire that. I think it shows the heart of a champion.
 
Still, somehow it's a wasted chance for Quintana as well as for Gaudu & Vlasov to gain over a minute on Vingegaard, Thomas, Martinez etc.

They were in a perfect position with 15 kilometres to go and threw it away!
Threw away how? Both teams were riding but just burned quicker than JV (or lets better say WvA). On the contrary, if even mountain domestiques like Konrad, Schachmann, or Barguil take pulls what else can you do? Politt and Hofstetter are no WvAs either.
 
In the end, surprisingly, GC-wise nothing much happened. Roglic and O’Connor lost time (Jungels finishing even behind him - had they had him wait?) and Haig’s DNF.

Btw, why did Gogl DNF? I saw him at the front taking pulls in the favorites group quite late (shortly before Pogacar attacked).
 
Was riveted to the screen for the last 2 hours of today's stage, so much happened. The last 10km of yesterday and today's stage is all I have watched of this years Tour. Guess I have lucked out. Plus, no sprint stages for ages, the way a Tour should be always.

Some observations

As much as today was epic and P-R is probably my favourite race, I am not sure about this type of stage in the Tour. I think it might have too much of a negative impact on a 3 week race.

Kirby is still awful on commentary.
 
I think you can't really make any complaints with the ride of those teams today. All did really great and overachieved in a sense with the expectations. In the end you had Pidcock, Laporte and van Aert chasing in a relatively big bunch. The group in front ran simply out of gas. I think there was no possibility to stay in front in that scenario.

Bora lost van Poppel along the way in the end phase (it wasn't shown if with a puncture/crash) and Schachmann really did his absolute best until the end, but was toast tbf in the last km. Haller and Politt lost contact earlier, but also had the nose in the wind constantly for over half the race. So in the end the game plan worked for Bora really good. Maybe they would have liked to have either Großschartner or Kämna also in group 1 but I think 4 riders is plenty for this team.

For FDJ it was basically only Küng left in the phase before the catch. I guess he could have dirven the pace, but probably it was already clear that it's a lost cause. Arkea tried more, but were also not committing as the catch became clear. Both Teams (like Bora) are also not set-up to push an advantage on this stage. They just had a few guys nominated to bring their GC Guy in with the others and they delivered really well.

Jumbo-Visma is just a absolute monster of a team. If the shoe would have been on the other foot (Pogacar with bad luck behind, Jumbo at the front) it would have been big gaps everywhere. So in the end they neutralized the race and gave most of the other GC guys also a free ride.
 
van Aert about the bike change chaos

- I can imagine it looked bad on tv. I was in the second group and in front of me I saw Jonas change bikes with Nathan but he is 190 cm so I said to Sepp Kuss who was with me to get ready to change bikes. But he misunderstood and stopped right away instead of getting over to Jonas. When I passed Jonas I said to him he should take Sepp's bike but Sepp waited a hundred metres further back. It was a stressed moment and a lot of things didn't work out.

 
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Daniel Oss abandoned. (I don't know if anyone has already posted this. I tried to search the forum.)

He was riding in the gutter and ran into someone taking pictures. Sadly, he fractured a vertebrae.

The video of the crash is embedded in this article.

 
I briefly wondered if JV screwed up by putting Laporte and another domestique on the front of the group instead of having them make sure Roglice and Vingegaard were close to the front at all times, but then the first rider to hit the hay bale was an FDJ guy right at the front who just happened to stay upright. Sometimes it really is bad luck.
 
Roglic and Ewan crashing

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Daniel Oss abandoned. (I don't know if anyone has already posted this. I tried to search the forum.)

He was riding in the gutter and ran into someone taking pictures. Sadly, he fractured a vertebrae.

The video of the crash is embedded in this article.


Sadly some things will never change
 
Re-posted from the Roglic thread.

I think the worst part is not him crashing, but his whole team riding past him. You could see in point he was only like 10 or 15 seconds behind the cars of that chasing group. It's so weird that they just rode away.

Here is a graph with time differences, where you can see he and Hooydonck were really close to the Wout group, literally about 10 seconds behind, before dropping off.

66003064.jpg
 
You mean them riding past him or riding away from him later on. If you mean the former: they probably didn't even see him as he was among spectators sitting in one of their chairs putting his dislocated shoulder in place again.

I didn't know that later on the gap only was about 10/15 seconds. Weird but maybe the team didn't know that either? I mean this was a pretty hectic stage to put it mildly.
 
Jumbo-Visma is just a absolute monster of a team. If the shoe would have been on the other foot (Pogacar with bad luck behind, Jumbo at the front) it would have been big gaps everywhere. So in the end they neutralized the race and gave most of the other GC guys also a free ride.

OTOH if Pogacar had JV guys riding for him the race would have been over yesterday. His weak team adds some drama to the race.
 
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