Matej Mohoric won a volatile 19th stage of the Tour de France after narrowly outsprinting Kasper Asgreen, a stage winner 24 hours earlier, in Poligny. The Slovenian won by a hair’s breadth, his last-gasp bike throw doing enough to ensure his Bahrain Victorious team’s third stage win in the 2023 Tour.
A rapid afternoon of racing through the Jura focused less on the overall standings and more on Alpecin-Deceuninck’s Jasper Philipsen. The wearer of the green jersey as leader of the points classification, Philipsen battled to ensure that rival Mads Pedersen, of Lidl-Trek, was not allowed to sneak up the road to further narrow the gap between them.
In the end, it boiled down to a furious chase between a nine-man group of pursuers, containing the Belgian sprinter Philipsen, and three breakaway riders. Asgreen, of Soudal Quick-Step, winner in Bourg-en-Bresse on Thursday; Ben O’Connor of AG2R Citroën; and Mohoric as they closed on the finish line. After his win, Mohoric said that his success meant a lot because “it’s hard and cruel to be a pro cyclist”.
“You suffer a lot in preparation, you sacrifice your life and your family and do everything you can to be ready,” he said. “Then you realise everyone is so incredibly strong that it’s hard to follow the wheels sometimes.
“Sometimes you feel like you don’t belong here … even today I was thinking how the guy who is pulling [at the front], is suffering as much as you do. It’s cruel.”
Speaking to the media after the stage, the race leader, Jonas Vingegaard of the Jumbo-Visma team, was again asked about his pre-Tour altitude camps and about the number of anti-doping controls carried out during his visits to Tenerife, Sierra Nevada and Tignes.
“I cannot remember, really – I have no clue,” he said. “I don’t remember the number of doping controls I have in February. I was tested for sure at each one of them [the camps].”
Meanwhile the fallout from the chaotic scenes in Wednesday’s stage over the Col de la Loze to Courchevel continued, with one team manager citing the numbers of small children on the race route and telling the Guardian that he was “very angry” at the lack of crowd control on the narrow climb.
The race director, Thierry Gouvenou, was one of those to acknowledge the “Netflix effect” increasingly being cited as the reason for this year’s Tour attracting rowdier crowds to the roadside. The Netflix series Tour de France: Unchained, first streamed in June, is believed to have attracted a new, younger cycling fan to the roadside, one that is perhaps unfamiliar with the culture of the race.
“This year the Tour has been exciting and there are many, many more spectators than in other years,” Gouvenou said. “And it’s a slightly different crowd, one that’s a bit more festive and less respectful, that doesn’t know the etiquette of a good supporter. So it’s true that in some places, we’ve found ourselves in a bit of difficulty.
“I don’t know if it’s the Netflix effect. I know the viewer wants to be with his phone and he wants to put himself in the picture, in the Tour de France. That’s the way it is.”
Days after an attack by Tadej Pogacar had been blocked by unruly crowds and motorbikes, media motorbikes, race direction vehicles and team cars were all stalled at points during the steep and narrow climb of the Loze, even forcing Vingegaard to stop at one point.
“The gradient on the section of the Loze where there have been problems is more than 20%,” Gouvenou said. “Barriers in 20% sections don’t work.
“We’re going to have to review the number of vehicles in these difficult sections. Maybe we have too many media around the riders in these passages where we know there are going to be people and steep gradients, but we’re not going to ban the public from coming to the Tour de France.”
Saturday’s final mountain stage, over six climbs in the Vosges, from Belfort to Le Markstein, is expected to be, in Vingegaard’s words, “really explosive”.
“It’s the last mountain stage and I think everybody in the bunch has saved their legs,” the Dane said.
