Key Takeaways: Tour de France Stage 9

Breaking down how the highly controversial but thrilling gravel stage was won and how it affected the battle for the Yellow Jersey

Anthony Turgis, riding for the struggling TotalEnergies, pulled out yet another unexpected French victory by outfoxing the higher-profile riders in an exceptionally strong early breakaway on a thrilling stage that started and finished in Troyes while weaving through the rolling hills and gnarly gravel roads of the Champagne wine region. While the stage win may have gone to the breakaway, the story of the day was the one-day Classic that broke out in the GC group behind, which saw the main GC contenders forced to stick to the front as much as possible to avoid missing splits. After Remco Evenepoel and Tadej Pogačar launched attacks as Jonas Vingegaard and Primož Roglič were forced to mark moves and chase back on, the GC group ended up coming back together before the finish line, and the stage produced almost no significant time gaps or changes in the overall classification. However, even with its lack of gaps and spectator-friendly, thrilling start-to-finish action for both the stage win and GC contenders, the ‘Gravel Stage’ was an instant classic that told us a lot about what to expect for the rest of the Tour and is likely one that organizers will attempt to replicate in future editions.

Stage Top Five:
1) Anthony Turgis (TotalEnergies) +0
2) Thomas Pidcock (INEOS Grenadiers) +0
3) Derek Gee (Israel-Premier Tech) +0
4) Alex Aranburu (Movistar) +0
5) Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost) +0

Green (Points) Jersey
1) Biniam Girmay (Intermarché-Wanty)-224pts
2) Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceunick) 128pts
3) Jonas Abrahamsen (Uno-X Mobility)-107pts

Current GC Top Five:
1) Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) +0
2) Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) +33
3) Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) +1’15
4) Primož Roglič (Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe) +1’36
5) Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates) +2’16

Stage 9 Race Notebook

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151.3km: With gravel sectors scattered throughout the course, which will make the stage incredibly hard to control, the start is insanely fast with non-stop aggressive attacking. Eventually, a group including some of the strongest Classics riders in the race, such as Derek Gee, Jasper Stuyven, and Anthony Turgis, gets a small gap extending to 20-seconds when they hit the day’s first gravel sector.

147.9km-132.7km: With the gap out to nearly a minute, Ben Healy and Tom Pidcock attack to bridge across. In order to ensure they make it, EF sends Neilson Powless back from the front to pull them, and he is dropped shortly after they make the junction.

130.5km: Heading into a particularly tough uphill section, everyone behind the front are forced to get off their bikes and run after hitting a bottleneck.

129.7km: During the chaos, Redbull-Bora’s Primož Roglič is stuck behind and forced to sit up and collect his team so they can pace him across the 30+ second gap as Visma drives the pace up ahead.

114.3km: After his team closes the gap to within a few seconds, Roglič personally sprints across the remaining space to ensure he gets back on just before a fast descent leading onto another tough sector.

89.7km: After Jonas Vingegaard suffers a flat tire and is forced to take a bike from his teammate, Jan Tratnik, and is unable to get back on his own bike due to the relentless high pace, Tadej Pogačar leverages his superior bike handling skills to attack a downhill gravel sector (just like at Strade-Bianche) and takes the lead onto the ensuing pavement. This forces the others, like Remco Evenepoel, to chase him down personally since he can’t rely on his domestiques to make up the difference.

77.5km: Evenepoel similarly tries to copy a move that has led to success at a major one-day by attacking a paved climb incredibly far from the finish line. Pogačar is completely isolated from his UAE team, while several strong Visma teammates surround Vingegaard. Interestingly, Pogačar sits behind Vingegaard and his Visma teammates instead of following.

76.3km: Not trusting Visma to close the gap for him, Pogačar doesn’t take any risks and unleashes a searing attack when they get back onto the gravel to bridge to Evenepoel. Knowing the two riders will relay to the finish if he isn’t present, Vingegaard smartly follows.

74.5km: Once Pogačar and Vingegaard make the junction, Evenepoel keeps going, and quickly closes the gap to the breakaway, which is now only 23 seconds ahead of the peloton behind.

71.3km-67.5km: When Vingegaard smartly refuses to work (Pogačar and Evenepoel are both one-day Monument winners and would surely try to drop the now-isolated Vingegaard if he works with him), unless the other two want to pull Vingegaard to the line, they have no choice but to sit up and return to the peloton. The breakaway realizes they have a new lease on life and begins working together to blow their gap back out to over a minute.

21.9km: With a strong chase group, including Biniam Girmay, Mathieu van der Poel, and Michael Matthews, in between the breakaway and the peloton, Pogačar again flashes incredible power by attacking on a flat gravel sector and immediately dropping everyone but Vingegaard and two Visma teammates.

21.4km: However, Pogačar’s pace is so high that Vingegaard is dropped and isolated while his two teammates, Matteo Jorgenson and Christophe Laporte, don’t realize this and stay with Pogačar.

19.7km: Eventually, Jorgenson realizes Vingegaard has been dropped and goes back to retrieve him and pace him back to Pogačar. Meanwhile, Evenepoel is forced to pace himself back from behind Vingegaard while Pogačar’s teammates Almeida and Ayuso sit on his wheel.

11.3km: Up front, Jasper Stuyven goes to the other side of the road and unleashes a textbook ‘from the break late attack’ that quickly gives him a promising advantage and puts the chase group in a difficult position since whoever closes him down is certain not to win the stage.

8.3.km-5.3km: Even after Pogačar is reeled in and the GC group begins to swell, Pogačar is still accelerating out of every corner, presumably in an effort to continue to press the others and add fatigue and stress to their legs since he is such a better off-road rider that he is putting out less effort to ride the same speed on the gravel. In between the peloton and the front, the Van der Poel chase group bogs down, likely due to having so many strong sprinters that nobody wants to go all-out to pull the others to the line.

100m: After Alexey Lutsenko somewhat strangely reels in Stuyven, Turgis, who is visibly fresher than the others, sees that Derek Gee will be the first to open his sprint and immediately jumps into his slipstream.

Finish: Turgis fires out of the slipstream and builds up a gap he holds over the line for a massive stage win. Tom Pidcock finishes a close second while Gee finishes third, and his time gains on the day move him up into ninth place overall.

Three Key Takeaways

1) The Controversial Gravel Stage Was an Undeniable Blockbuster Hit: This inclusion of a significant number of rough gravel kilometers may have been extremely controversial and even bordered on gimmicky at times, but it is undeniable that it was one of the most exciting individual stages in modern Tour de France history. It was must-see TV throughout its entire 4+ hour run time and will almost certainly be the most entertaining stage of the race.

• Outside of the time spent riding on the actual gravel, the mere thought of it almost seemed to make the peloton lose its collective mind. It was as if the Tour de France paused for a day to hold a flash One-Day Classic. The fight for the breakaway was brutal, and despite relatively mild elevation gain, the constant attacking to make the break thinned down the bunch and ensured that only riders with the most elite engines could contest the stage.

  • In the fight for the stage win, Anthony Turgis, after a fantastic job of slipping into the early breakaway, executed a cold-blooded stage win ahead of much more high-profile companions after perfectly reading the final few hundred meters.

    • The win netted the 30-year-old Turgis, who appeared to be on the precipice of breaking out as a Classics star after a 4th place at the Tour of Flanders in 2020 and three straight top tens at Milano-Sanremo between 2021-2023, a long-coming first career WorldTour win.

      • The fact that he won what will likely end up being one of the hardest and most challenging stages of the race means that this wasn’t just a fluke but indicative of his incredible class.

    • The victory was massive for Turgis’ TotalEnergies outfit, which, judging by UCI points, is the worst team in this race. Outside of today, it only had a single WorldTour win through the last two seasons. But, the fact that they scored this victory on such a blockbuster stage means that while their wins are few and far between, this victory will loom large in the memories of fans and sponsors.

      • The win also gives the French their third stage win at their home Tour and shows that low-budget teams (DSM, Arkéa, and TotalEnergies) with these riders can still compete in the new highly scientific era.

• Back in the GC group, Tadej Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel were aggressive to the point of recklessness, attacking from distances they would typically only attempt in one-day Classics, likely due to sensing weakness in Vingegaard, who impressively weathered these blows despite looking shaky at times.

  • While this ultra-aggressive racing in the GC group was thrilling to watch, it netted no time differences outside of Derek Gee moving into the top ten.

2) The Big Four Overall Contenders All Experienced Major Ups & Downs Throughout the Day: While the four top GC contenders all finished on the same time, they did so with varying degrees of comfort, which likely tells us quite a lot about what to expect going forward.

• Tadej Pogačar: The race leader looked to be in incandescent form on the loose gravel roads and clearly smelled blood in the water, and was looking to take time and add fatigue to the legs of his GC rivals by leveraging his superior off-road skills to force them to spend massive amounts of energy responding to his attacks (which he is performing with less energy due to his skill over the gravel).

  • While it was impressive that his rivals struggled to hold his wheel while he attacked on the flats, the fact that he failed to take time and was isolated from his team at key portions wasn’t ideal and felt like a massive missed opportunity to strike a major blow before the first rest day.

• Jonas Vingegaard: The defending champion looked incredibly shaky at times throughout the stage, and, considering he was ridden right out of Pogačar’s wheel, showed serious signs of weakness that could come to the fore in the mountains next week. However, the fact that he made it through the stage without losing a second to Pogačar is an undeniable win.

  • Vingegaard caught a lot of heat from both fans and his rivals for refusing to pull at any point during the attacks, but there was no logical reason for him to relay through when off the front with the two other main GC contenders, since if he rides clear with Evenepoel and Pogačar with 70+km to go, Pogačar would likely have attacked and dropped him before the finish, or at least just taken time bonus seconds on him.

    • For Vingegaard, the mission of the day was to stay as close to his strong team as possible to protect him from facing the supersonic Pogačar, who had the high ground on this terrain, and Vingegaard showed incredible discipline by refusing to take part in anything that didn’t fit into this simple mission.

• Remco Evenepoel: The current runner-up took a significant step toward Tour contender legitimacy today after weathering attacks on terrain that didn’t suit him.

  • Despite sitting in a poor position for most of the gravel sectors and finding himself on the wrong side of a split multiple times, he was able to use his incredible fitness to correct these mistakes.

    • Judging by their decision not to pull with Pogačar after distancing Evenepoel, it is clear Visma and Vingegaard don’t see Evenepoel as a legitimate GC threat. However, his form and poise through nine stages have been seriously impressive, and it could be wise to start paying attention to him before it is too late.

• Primož Roglič: Despite looking the worst he has in years and finding himself dropped at some point on every major GC stage, Roglič hasn’t lost any serious time and is sitting in a very strong position to eventually finish on the podium.

  • From a glance, Roglič’s riding style so far might best be compared to Mr. Magoo, where he makes every mistake possible but somehow skates through the danger to end up exactly where he needs to be. This is a testament to a composure and toughness that almost every rider lacks.

    • He might look like the weakest of these four at the moment, but he likely expended the least amount of energy today due to staying in the wheels nearly the entire time. Plus, the fact that he was able to get through this bad week without ceding major time could end up being hugely important.

3) The Day Highlighted Significant Vulnerabilities at UAE & Strengths at Visma-Lease a Bike: The stage may not have produced significant GC gaps, but it highlighted how vital team strength is for GC contenders.

• For example, due to his strong Visma teammates, especially Wout van Aert and Matteo Jorgenson, Jonas Vingegaard avoided losing time, potentially minutes, to a flying Pogačar, just like they limited his losses back on the cobbled Stage 5 of the 2022 Tour de France. Having teammates who could keep him positioned at the front to stay in front of splits and respond to Pogačar’s searing attacks before dropping back to help him close the gap was the difference between losing serious time and getting through the day with no losses.

  • Just like that 2022 Tour stage, Vingegaard suffered a mechanical issue and was forced to change bikes. But unlike that debacle, where he couldn’t get a correct-sized frame, the team ensured that a rider similar in height, Jan Tratnik, was next to him so he could easily change bikes.

    • This decision was key, especially on a Dutch team with a fleet of unusually tall riders, and proved to be essential since if Vingegaard couldn’t easily swap bikes with Tratnik after his flat, his GC campaign could very well have been over.

• Conversely, if Tadej Pogačar were on Visma-Lease a Bike today, he would have taken significant time on his rivals.

  • Instead, he invested a massive amount of energy for no realized gains due to having a weaker team on Classic-style stages.

Stage 10 Preview coming in tomorrow’s Rest Day Review…