Tour de France: Movistar look to the mountains after exceeding expectations on the cobbles
All's well that ends well. As far as sending three climbers over the cobblestones of northern France goes, Movistar couldn't have asked for much more from stage 9 of the Tour de France. Granted, Mikel Landa crashed and was forced into a long chase, but limiting his damage to just seven seconds allowed the Spanish team to revel in a team performance that far exceeded expectations.
Many feared for the Spanish team. Alejandro Valverde is an 'all-terrain' rider and showed this spring he can handle cobbles, but for pure climbers Nairo Quintana and Mikel Landa the Paris-Roubaix-inspired stage represented a major pitfall that had the potential to derail their entire three weeks.
However, the men in blue were the right side of almost every split on a chaotic day. When the peloton was chopped in two on sector 12, with 67km to go, they had all their men up front, barring Jose Joaquin Rojas who had to abandon due to an early crash.
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Quintana did have one small mishap, but the real adversity came when Landa crashed with 32km to go. While taking a drink from his bidon, he hit something in the road and came down hard, ripping his jersey and shorts on the right-hand side. Imanol Erviti, Daniele Bennati, and Andrey Amador all dropped back to try and pull him towards the front of the race. It didn't look good, with the gap to the GC group hovering at 40 seconds for several kilometres, but late on, with the help of AG2R similarly working to rescue the day for Romain Bardet, they turned it around in the final 10 kilometres and Landa came home just seven seconds behind his rivals.
"I'm happy because we rescued a very complicated situation," Landa said at the finish line.
"I was taking a drink on the tarmac between the cobbled sectors and I rode over a drain. My teammates were 10 out of 10 after that crash, and not just then but during the whole day, looking after us three, rectifying that problem. We have to congratulate them because they did an incredible job."
Quintana
Team effort
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