The question that had dominated the Tour since the summit of the Peyresourde on July 9th was whether Nairo Quintana would be capable to take the fight to Chris Froome once the race reached the Alps and on the evidence of the first of this week's four Alpine stages, the Colombian will not be up to the task.
Last year’s runner-up was unable even to hold the pace of Froome’s closest rivals in the final kilometre after the race leader and his former team-mate Richie Porte had flown the nest, and while his loss of 28 seconds may not prove conclusive the trend is in one direction only.
This finish was never expected to be definitive but the portents are ominous for Froome’s rivals as the race leader chipped away more time, finishing with Porte ahead of Adam Yates, who remains third overall at 2min 53sec, Fabio Aru and Romain Bardet, with Quintana limiting his losses but looking utterly spent. There were bigger losers: most notably the Dutchman Bauke Mollema, who slipped back inside the final two kilometres but conserved second place, 2min 27sec behind Froome, while Alejandro Valverde cracked 4.5km from the line and dropped from fifth to seventh overall.
Dan Martin gambled on a final climb attack, jumping clear of a group containing Froome and the other contenders in a bid to make up time.
“The pace kind of lulled a little bit,” he said after the stage. “I thought Sky were going to go really hard, that Froome was going to attack but in fact they backed it off a little bit. I kind of thought maybe they weren’t feeling so good.
“I am five minutes down. Why not attack? Maybe they would let me go.”
However the team ramped up the pace and reeled him in again. His effort and the subsequent accelerations from the group put him in difficultly and he ended up conceding 47 seconds to Froome and Richie Porte (BMC Racing Team).
“It is a complement [that they chased], obviously I am still a threat,” he said with a smile. He remains ninth overall.
The other Irish rider in the race, Sam Bennett (Bora Argon 18) finished in the sprinters’ group and is one stage closer to Paris.
Froome said: “Quintana tried but perhaps he didn’t have the legs. Richie was very strong today. It wasn’t easy today, the first phase was flat out. It’s never easy but I’m feeling better than in any third week of a Grand Tour before.”
He expects Quintana and Porte to be the danger men in Thursday’s mountain time trial; the latter looks set to move up towards the podium but citing the Colombian as a threat seems a mere courtesy.
Up above this remote spot only a few kilometres inside the Swiss border with France, Mont Blanc was unseasonably white, with snow warnings still in place for footpaths, in spite of the fact the Tour again baked in searing temperatures. Porte looked the coolest of Froome’s opponents and the 1min 45sec he lost in the stage finish at Cherbourg could cost him dear.
The Australian’s attack with two kilometres to go prompted a response from Quintana but Wout Poels was given the task on Froome’s behalf, with his effort enough to dislodge Mollema, which in turn prompted Froome to accelerate. Quintana hung on before cracking 400m from the line as Aru, Yates and Bardet wisely kept at their own pace.
While Froome and the little circle of contenders for the top 10 – it is stretching reality to promote them as more than nominal threats for the overall title – fought out their own battle, initiated by Ireland’s Daniel Martin, but won convincingly by Froome. A few minutes earlier the stage victory had been contested by two of the trio who dominated the final phase of Sunday’s stage through the Jura to Culoz, with Ilnur Zakarin of Russia taking the stage from Jarlinson Pantano of Colombia.
The Russian eluded Pantano and the king of the mountains Rafal Majka at 7.5km to go, with the Colombian chasing to no avail. Zakarin struggled horribly in the final kilometre, to the extent that when he tried to take his hands off the handlebars to do up the zip of his jersey to display his sponsor’s name, he wobbled and nearly fell off.
By then he had all but sealed a timely win for the Katyusha team but inevitably, given the state of Russian sport, the reed-thin 26-year-old from Tatarstan, the world junior time trial champion in 2007, has a doping history. He tested positive for the steroid methandienone in 2009 and served a two-year suspension, although he insists it was merely a youthful peccadillo, that he was misled and has seen the error of his ways.
He came to prominence last year when he won the Tour of Romandie ahead of Froome and added a stage win on a rain-soaked day in the Giro d’Italia. This year, he showed strongly in Romandie, where he held on to Quintana on the second stage but was disqualified from the win for misbehaving in the sprint. He was unlucky to crash out of the Giro when fifth overall.
With 13 teams still to win a stage, the battle to get into the escape that would decide the stage finish was intense, which in turn led to 51km being covered in the first hour southwards out of Berne. A group of 11 riders emerged, joined by a further eight, including the points leader Peter Sagan, who has a practice of getting in mountain escapes, snaffling the intermediate sprint points and then cycle-touring into the finish.
Together with Sagan were past stage winners Majka and the Culoz winner, Pantano, plus Zakarin, who had felt he was robbed of the Culoz victory by a mislaid contact lens. By the foot of the final double ascents – 30km of climbing split into two by an 8km downhill – they had a 12min lead, and one of their number was assured of the stage win.
Both the front peloton and the main group stretched and split as soon as it reached the first slopes of the first category, Col de Forclaz, a relatively wide road cutting across a steep hillside between tight-packed vineyards above the town of Martigny. The sight was a familiar one: Team Sky’s domestiques on the front, the rest lined out behind. The Forclaz was followed by a brief descent and then, at the point where the road into France went straight ahead, a right turn on to the finish climb, 10.4km long, at an average gradient of around one in 11.
This finish among a complex of three hydro-electric dams close to 2,000m above sea level on the Franco-Swiss border was a vast logistical experiment. The large team buses could barely get up the single-track mountain road on the final climb, while the podium was sandwiched between a rockface and an abyss with the reservoir at its foot. There was barely space for 50 people to watch the jerseys being awarded. The Tour’s massive publicity caravan was not permitted to drive up to the finish, making this a curiously muted occasion.
The action on Thursday shifts down the valley past Chamonix to the 17km climb through the town of Combloux to the ski resort of Megeve for the Tour’s first mountain time trial since 2013, when Froome won a longer stage in the south of the Alps. There is a flat run-in to the initial steep ascent, which then drags upwards before what should be a breathtaking 2.5km sprint down to the line.
The start is in Sallanches, a town with immense resonance for French cycling fans as this was the site of Bernard Hinault’s victory in the world road race championship in 1980. This was one of the Badger’s most emphatic wins, forged on the slopes of the Domancy hill, which features in the course. This nod to what now seems a golden era underlines that this has been a poor Tour for the French, still without a stage win and with only Bardet in the top 10 overall – and five days to reverse that trend.
Stage 17 result
Ilnur Zakarin (Russia / Katusha) 4:36:33” 2. Jarlinson Pantano (Colombia / IAM Cycling) +55” 3. Rafal Majka (Poland / Tinkoff) +1:26” 4. Kristijan Durasek (Croatia / Lampre) +1:32” 5. Brice Feillu (France / Fortuneo) +2:33” 6. Thomas Voeckler (France / Direct Energie) +2:46” 7. Domenico Pozzovivo (Italy / AG2R) +2:50” 8. Stef Clement (Netherlands / IAM Cycling) +2:57” 9. Steve Morabito (Switzerland / FDJ) +4:38” 10. Richie Porte (Australia / BMC Racing) +7:59” 11. Chris Froome (Britain / Team Sky) 12. Adam Yates (Britain / Orica) +8:07” 13. Romain Bardet (France / AG2R) +8:10” 14. Fabio Aru (Italy / Astana) +8:18” 15. Louis Meintjes (South Africa / Lampre) 16. Nairo Quintana (Colombia / Movistar) +8:27” 17. Wout Poels (Netherlands / Team Sky) +8:39” 18. Bauke Mollema (Netherlands / Trek)
General classification after stage 17
1. Chris Froome (Team Sky) 77:25:10”
2. Bauke Mollema (Trek) +2:27”
3. Adam Yates (Orica) +2:53”
4. Nairo Quintana (Movistar) +3:27”
5. Alejandro Valverde (Movistar) +4:15”
6. Romain Bardet (AG2R) +4:27”
7. Richie Porte (BMC Racing) +5:19”
8. Fabio Aru (Astana) +5:35”
9. Daniel Martin (Etixx-Quick-Step) +5:50”
10. Louis Meintjes (Lampre-Merida) +6:07”
(Guardian service)
