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It was billed as the last speed showdown before the Champs-Elysées, and may well have decided the winner of this year’s Tour de France first jersey. It’s just not the encore on stage in Poitiers that Sam Bennett was looking for.
Caught somewhere between disaster and scare, Bennett was left without consecutive stage wins by the width of the rim on his front wheel, outmatched in the death of stage 11 by his increasingly close rival Caleb Ewan of Australia. who had finished second behind the Irish rider the day before, clinching his fifth stage win overall.
At the same time, Bennett’s rival for the green jersey, Peter Sagan, was overtaking Wout van Aert on his right, originally finishing second, only using his head and shoulders in the process: once reviewed by the race stewards, Sagan was finished for dangerous driving. , relegated to the back of the group (in this case the 85th), and deducted all his points and a quarter from the winner of the stage (in this case 43).
It means that Bennett defended his green jersey with a now surely insurmountable advantage over his Slovak rival, 243 points to 175, given that the correctly flat last stage will be the last race to Paris on Sunday of the week. Bennett has yet to go that far, easier said than done, and for now he clearly feels that the end of Wednesday’s stage was a missed opportunity rather than a won one.
“I really don’t know what happened, it was so hectic,” said Bennett, who has now finished first, second (twice), third and fourth so far. “The team did a fantastic job all day, taking care of me, and just in the last few hundred meters, it was difficult to make the change from following a teammate to doing it alone, I found myself too early, too early.
“Then I found myself trying to back up, but it was a little late, then they came at full speed and it was a complete disaster. I just tried to limit my losses and get the best result that I could. “
For Van Aert (Jumbo-Visma), the Belgian who admitted to being “really scared” by Sagan’s final sprint tactic, the decision to relegate the Slovakian was clearly the right one, although Bennett was slower to judge: “Like, a A big part of running is rubbing shoulders, but I’ll have to see it, I really don’t know what happened. ”
With the wheels and perhaps emotions still spinning from Tuesday’s first stage win, Bennett possibly lost some of his focus. With his Deceuninck-QuickStep team absolutely making sure that stage 11 was reduced to pure sprinters as well, Bennett seemed to be in the perfect position once again on the long, open road that led the peloton to the finish.
There was some confusion in the last 6 km, which included a small climb 3 km from the finish, when two cyclists broke the front, trying to interrupt the train, Lukas Pöstlberger Bora-Hansgrohe followed by Kasper Asgreen from Deceuninck-QuickStep, but there was all together again entering the last 2km, and Bennett insisted that this had no impact on his arrival.
He also rejected the suggestion that Ewan (Lotto Soudal) was taking advantage simply by sitting back on his wheel: “No, what can you do? If I had to do it to him, I probably would. His departure train does not take him to the final. But I focus on myself, I keep doing what I’m doing. “
Bennett started stage 11 after having equaled two Irish milestones in Tour de France history – only the sixth Irish rider to win a stage outright, and only the second Irish rider to win a Tour stage plus the Giro and the Vuelta. But no Irish rider had ever won back-to-back stages on the Tour, and Bennett also had that chance from history to deal with.
Bennett may well have felt he had a special rendezvous with the arrival of stage 11 in Poitiers: When a stage of the Tour ended here for the last time, in 1978, his Carrick-on-Suir partner, Seán Kelly, won the first of his five stages in the Tour de France, the then 22-year-old’s first home in the little five-man separatist sprint on the banks of the River Clain. Unfortunately, it was not.
After suffering a heavy crash on Tuesday, Nicolas Roche arrived safely at this stage in 138th place, in the same group as Dan Martin, 133, who finished four minutes and 25 seconds behind. Jumbo-Visma’s Primoz Roglic, who last Sunday became the first Slovenian rider to win the leader’s yellow jersey, defended it comfortably again and is still 21 seconds ahead of defending champion Egan Bernal of Ineos Grenadiers
Thursday’s stage 12, the 218 km from Chauvigny to Sarran-Corrèze, is the longest of the 2020 Tour and features two categorized climbs in the last 40 km.
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