After an excellent start to the Tour de France, almost everything went wrong for Jumbo-Visma in the fifth stage on Wednesday. A reconstruction of a ride full of bad luck, falls, panic and considerable damage on the northern French cobblestones.
Prologue
Less than 10 meters from the entrance to the infamous Bos van Wallers, Grischa Niermann steps out of the Jumbo-Visma team bus towards a battery of cameras. Since November, the team director and his colleagues have spent hours and hours preparing for the Tour’s crucial cobblestone stage, precisely to avoid the scenario that has unfolded in recent hours. “We had a nice shitty day,” Niermann says with a sigh. “That’s the concise summary.”
95 kilometers to go
The first of a total of eleven cobblestone sections has yet to come when Wout van Aert and Steven Kruijswijk are on the ground at a roundabout. Van Aert had gone to pee for a while before the real work would begin. When he joined the pack, a traffic island caused braking riders and the jersey wearer fell. Van Aert is walking along the road, but he soon continues his way on a new bicycle. “Physically, the damage was not too bad,” he says.
91 kilometers to go
While Van Aert is chasing the peloton together with Kruijswijk, he suddenly sees a Team DSM team leader’s car stepping on the brakes just in front of him. With a clever piece of steering, the Fleming avoids the car at the very last moment and miraculously stays upright. “I was talking to ‘Stevie’ and still a little dazed after my fall, which made me brake just a little too late. It was a very scary moment, it was really only a few centimeters or something very serious had happened.”
For the app users: tap the tweet to see how Wout van Aert just managed to avoid the DSM car.
56 kilometers to go
In the first four stages, Van Aert was without a doubt the best rider in the Tour, but now it is noticeable that the yellow jersey is struggling to stay at the front of the pack. “I found it mentally difficult to fight for a good position again after that fall. That was the biggest struggle.”
36 kilometers to go
It may well be the picture of Jumbo-Visma’s bad luck day. In one shot we see two riders of the Dutch team standing by the side, one running on the road and one looking back in despair while cycling.
The chaos starts with material breakdown for leader Jonas Vingegaard. “I crashed into another rider, which caused my chain to come off,” said the Dane. “In retrospect, I should have just put the chain back on myself, but I panicked a bit.”
In his panic, the number two of last year’s Tour immediately jumps on the bike of his teammate Nathan Van Hooydonck, but the Belgian (1.93 meters) is much taller than Vingegaard (1.75 meters). On his much too large bicycle, the Dane can only pedal while standing, so that after a few hundred meters he comes to a halt again on the side of the road. Now he climbs on the bicycle of the 1.78 meter long Kruijswijk, but at exactly that moment the Jumbo-Visma car arrives with a bicycle with the correct dimensions for Vingegaard on the roof. After his third substitution in barely a minute, he can finally give chase.
“It didn’t go at all as we had agreed,” said Niermann. “Jonas should have immediately grabbed the bike from Kruijswijk or Sepp Kuss. We can discuss and pass that on a hundred times, but unfortunately this can happen at a heart rate of two hundred beats per minute and in this hectic pace.”
29 kilometers to go
Van Aert, Van Hooydonck and Tiesj Benoot try to get Vingegaard back into the first peloton when disaster strikes again, now with the other Jumbo-Visma leader. A motor pushes a straw bale onto the road, after which Primoz Roglic crashes hard, just like Lotto Soudal sprinter Caleb Ewan.
Roglic, who together with Christophe Laporte was the only Jumbo-Visma rider in the group with favorites, has quite a few scrapes, but the biggest problem is that his shoulder has dislocated. “Primoz has had this before and he can put his shoulder back in the socket himself, but he can’t do that when he is on the road,” says sports director Arthur van Dongen. “So when I got to the crash site by car – and it was fairly quick – I saw Primoz sitting on the side of the road in a spectator’s seat and putting his shoulder back.”
18 kilometers to go
Vingegaard’s group is just under a minute behind the first peloton, while Roglic, together with Benoot and Van Hooydonck, concede more than a minute and a half. Two-time Tour winner Tadej Pogacar sees his chance now that his two biggest competitors are in trouble and drives away from the group with favorites together with Jasper Stuyven. “We had big plans today, but in the end we were only able to chase,” said Van Aert.
7 kilometers to go
Pogacar virtually rode in the yellow jersey, but due to the top work of Van Aert and Laporte, Vingegaard’s group is slowly catching up with the defending champion. “At a certain point there were no more cars or motorcycles in front of us and we had the feeling that we were very far behind,” said Van Aert. “But we only had one option and that was to fight to the end.”
Roglic meanwhile only loses more ground. “We had to do risk management,” Niermann says. “We have two leaders this Tour with Primoz and Jonas and unfortunately they both needed help. That was the most annoying thing about the situation: if only one of the two had had bad luck, we could have had many more men waiting for the leader who was behind. Now we had to divide our forces.”
Primoz Roglic may have lost his Tour on the cobblestones.
Primoz Roglic may have lost his Tour on the cobblestones. Photo: AP
Finish
At the finish line in Arenberg, the damage for Vingegaard is ultimately not that bad. The Dane loses only thirteen seconds on Pogacar, giving him only 21 seconds in the standings on the Slovenian. “I had the best servants in the world today. I have to thank my teammates very much, because their great work has kept the gap with Pogacar small,” says the Dane.
Perhaps most surprising: Van Aert remains the leader in the general ranking. “I really had no idea that because of my head work I ensured that I myself kept the yellow,” said the Belgian. “I had already accepted that I would lose the jersey and only thought about helping my team. We drove as hard as possible to limit the damage for Jonas.”
Roglic cannot limit the damage. The Slovenian loses two minutes and eight seconds to Pogacar and already seems almost without a chance for the overall victory. “It was just a shit day,” concludes Van Aert. “But we still have two of the strongest GC riders in the squad, so we’ll keep fighting like we did today.”
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