tour reporter
Lennard Kämna is intercepted shortly before the finish. Alexander Vlasov loses time. Bora-hansgrohe invests a lot on the 7th stage of the tour and gains nothing.
Up at the end of that brutal ramp up to Super Planche des Belles Filles, dramatic scenes played out: professional cyclists fell to the ground gasping for air, lay down, poured water on their faces. The Dane Jonas Vingegaard had to cross the finish line of the 7th stage of the Tour de France be pushed away because he almost fell off the bike directly behind it.
Lennard Kämna was also trying to catch his breath, bent low over the handlebars of his bike. Which he managed relatively quickly. The German professional cyclist also needed the moment to process the disappointment and to come up with a somewhat satisfactory conclusion for the day. He also managed to do this impressively quickly.
100 meters missing on the “dirt mountain”
“It’s a shame, but I can’t blame myself. I couldn’t have driven a second faster.”said Kämna quite calmly. “In the end it’s just annoying that we still have to drive up this mountain of dirt, those last 100 meters.”
Lennard Kämna on the last few meters of the first mountain finish
It was exactly these 100 meters on the 24 percent steep final section that Kämna was missing to celebrate his second tour stage win after 2020. With the finish in sight at the final corner, Vingegaard sped past him with yellow jersey man Tadej Pogacar in tow. “You just think: Oaah, crap!”said Kamna. “But somehow I already knew that they would catch up with me.”
The outliers don’t get into the flow
Kämna was the last survivor of a breakaway formed after much fighting in the early stages of this stage. But the field, led by Pogacar’s UAE team, didn’t give the breakaways any real air.
The maximum lead was just over three minutes, which was also due to the fact that the six professional cyclists at the front didn’t really get along well with each other. “We didn’t drive that well, there was no train in the group”Kaemna complained. “If you’re not in the first place Flow and you’re fighting against it all day, it’s not so nice.”
Together with his teammate Maximlian Schachmann and Simon Geschke, the third German driver in the breakaway group, Kämna tried to speed things up by increasing the speed around 70 kilometers from the finish line.
The lead then remained constant for a while at just those three minutes. But Pogacar’s team didn’t give up and at the foot of the mountain, despite Schachmann’s self-sacrificing pace work, it was just under a minute and a half before the final climb.
Pogacar has other plans
Because the Slovenian, who ends up not only at Kämna, but also at Vingegaard sprinting past to win the stage had his own plans for the day. “I’ve had this stage in my head for a long time”explained Pogacar, who bagged his first tour win of 2020 a little further down the finish line on Friday in a time trial on the penultimate day. “The family was down on the mountain, my girlfriend Urska was at the top and the boys worked hard all day.”
Pogacar’s cannibalistic hunger for victory not only had consequences for Kämna, whose lead had melted down to almost 30 seconds by the last kilometer. Kämna’s captain Alexander Vlasov also fell victim to the high speed with which the UAE team smashed into the final climb four kilometers before the finish line.
Vlasov suffers from the consequences of the fall
The Russian complained at the finish that he had problems with his back. The aftermath of his crash on stage 6 the day before, where he crashed into the road at high speed in the final. On the final climb to the Super Planche des Belles Filles, Vlasov lost more than a minute and a half and is now twelfth overall, 2’41 behind Pogacar.
Ideally, Lennard crosses the line cheering in front and Alex might arrive with less damage and pat him on the back. That would have been the idea. But reality catches up.
This is probably one of the reasons why Schachmann and Kämna were given free rein by the team management at Bora-hansgrohe. “We want to drive attractively”said sporting director Rolf Aldag. “We have so many climbers with us. If one climber is in front, we still have three climbers with the captain. And if he can’t do better, he can’t do better. You can have seven men around him. He I have to start up on my own.”
Kämna: “There’s no point in getting angry”
At the end of the day, Bora-hansgrohe was left empty-handed despite a great deal of effort. “We invested a lot today. Now we have to take a deep breath and sleep on it for a night,” explained Aldag.
The podium in Paris is not out of Vlasov’s reach just yet and there may be more opportunities for a stage win in the coming two weeks. “What should I be upset about now, that’s no good either”said Kämna before he climbed into the team bus. “The tour is still long.”