If Paul Magnier was not already aware of the French saying “never two without three” then he should be now, having taken his third stage win in the Tour of Britain. This time it was in Northampton, yet it was the same picture as in Kelso on Tuesday and Newark on Friday: a last kilometre lead-out from Julian Alaphilippe and a perfectly timed final surge that caught the other sprinters napping. Overall, Stevie Williams remains in the lead with just one day remaining.
French sprinters are few and far between and it is six years since a French fastman – Arnaud Démare in this case – last landed a Tour de France stage win.
If the former mountain biker continues on this trajectory, however, it will not be long before speculation begins about his Grand Tour debut. Although how he will fit into the bigger picture at Soudal Quick-Step is intriguing, as they already have a specialist sprinter with a considerable pedigree in Tim Merlier.
For the moment, however, he is earning his spurs rapidly, and Alaphilippe and Remco Evenepoel are clearly happy to put in the hard yards for him. It was Evenepoel who put in the final push to bring the day’s three-man escape within reach, although Connor Swift, Matt Holmes and Rasmus Pedersen got tantalisingly close, surviving until the final kilometre.
It is a measure of Ineos’s desperation for a result that they sent Swift up the road from the off in the kind of doomed move that is normally aimed at garnering television time. The former British champion is an old hand, and he was continually talking tactics with Holmes – who had a four-year stint at the Belgian Lotto team but is racing as a privateer this season – and Pedersen, who is the Danish national champion and is set to move up to the Decathlon-Ag2R WorldTour team next year.
“We needed 1min 30sec going into the final 20km and we needed some energy, so we took the middle of the stage easy to make sure we could go full gas at the end,” explained Swift. “It was disappointing to come so close, all three of us were super strong.”
Flat stages are not without their perils as Great Britain’s Louis Sutton would testify. One of the strongest in the hills of stages two and three, Sutton was sitting pretty in sixth overall, until he was caught up in a crash at a pinch point on the run-in to Northampton. Unfortunately the pile-up was outside the three kilometres to go mark within which riders suffering a crash or a mechanical are allotted the same time as the winner; he lost 50sec and slipped to 11th.
Sunday’s 158km run through Suffolk to Felixstowe has barely a hillock to trouble the peloton, but race leader Williams will be well aware of the vigilance needed to ensure that he becomes the first Briton to win the home Tour since Steve Cummings in 2016. The forecast is for a fresh south or south-easterly breeze, which could split the peloton if it hits the race side-on, most likely on the stretch between Framlingham, Aldeburgh and Bickham Market between 94 and 47km to go.
