The world’s 3 fastest cyclists are racing for 2 podium spots in the Tour de France’s final time trial
The battle for the yellow jersey is pretty much over, but there’s about to be a brawl for the last two podium spots at the 2018 Tour de France.
No one is going to catch Geraint Thomas for the yellow jersey at the 2018 Tour de France barring disaster. He has a lead of two minutes and five seconds over his next closest competitor with only a time trial remaining between him and several boozy laps around the Champs-Élysées on Sunday. That lead, combined with how poised he has been for three weeks, is near insurmountable.
But behind him — hoo man — there’s about to be a fight. Here is the current top four on the general classification:
- Geraint Thomas (Sky) - + 79h 49’ 31”
- Tom Dumoulin (Sunweb) - + 2’ 05”
- Primož Roglič (LottoNL-Jumbo) - + 2’ 24”
- Chris Froome (Sky) - + 2’ 37”
On Friday, Slovenian rider Primož Roglič descended away from a group of the best riders in the world to win Stage 19. With the move, he hopped up to third place overall, just 19 seconds back of Tom Dumoulin and 13 seconds in front of Chris Froome.
That makes three men competing for two spots on the final podium, one of them a four-time yellow jersey winner, with just one stage — a time trial on Saturday — left to shake out the standings.
And on that note, here are the results of the men’s elite time trial event at the 2017 UCI World Championships:
Fancy that — the reining fastest time trialists in the world are going head to head to head once more on a time trial stage, only this time under much different circumstances with arguably higher stakes.
A podium place in the Tour de France validates three weeks of effort, not just one day. And instead of coming in fresh, these riders are entering Saturday at a nadir. There are 19 days of accumulated fatigue in their legs, and they will have just raced, all-out, on a monster mountain stage the day before.
One of these extremely talented, hard working, and very tired men is going to be left off the final ceremony stage while the others receive flowers and adulation. Just like at the Olympics, there’s no prize for fourth.
Looking at the results of the world championships, it’d be easy to handicap Dumoulin as the winner. And he is certainly the favorite, but Roglic can’t be discounted here. He by far looked like the freshest rider among the three on Friday. Not only was he the superior descender, he repeatedly made attacks on the climbs to the Col du Tourmalet and the Col d’Aubisque. In the final kilometers of the stage, he was able to isolate Froome off the back of the yellow jersey group, forcing the reining champion to expend a lot more energy than he would have liked.
Likewise, one might be tempted to discount Froome, who cracked on Stage 17 and nearly did again Friday. Don’t. Though Froome certainly isn’t at the height of his powers — both he and Dumoulin rode the Giro d’Italia in May, and seem to be feeling the effects — he has been a master of the late-race time trial in the past. Last year, he took third place on the Stage 20 individual time trial, beating Roglic by 43 seconds over 22.5 kilometers.
Saturday’s course is even longer at 31 kilometers, and hilly. Here’s the profile from the official site of the Tour:
The course was designed for big time gaps, not that it will take much to jumble the standings with 32 seconds separating fourth-place Froome from second-place Dumoulin.
Adding to the drama is the fact that all three riders will be on the course at the same time. Riders go off in reverse order of the standings. The last-place rider, 145th Lawson Craddock, will start at 6 a.m. ET, and this battle royale should begin sometime shortly after 10 a.m.
The race for the podium is the last competition left in this big, magnificent race, and it just may be the best.