Dan Martin: It's only a race, you might as well enjoy yourself

The Tarn was bathed in pleasant sunshine, the skies were laser blue, and the roadside was lined with spectators as the yellow jersey group climbed the Pic de Nore on Sunday afternoon. It was an idyllic, made-for-television Tour de France image, but, for Dan Martin, at least, one crucial ingredient was missing: a bike race.

With eventual stage winner Magnus Cort and the early break some 12 minutes up the road, and after two wearying weeks to this point, there seemed to be little appetite for insurrection in the main peloton, where the Sky team of yellow jersey Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome assumed its usual position on the front.

Almost 10 kilometres from the summit and some 50 kilometres from the stage finish in Carcassonne, Martin decided to see if he could shake the peloton from its torpor with an acceleration. Nobody even tried to come with him.

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“I was bored, to be honest,” Martin smiled on wheeling to a halt in Carcassonne. “Sky and Lotto-Jumbo were blocking the road. They just wanted to go really easy on the climb. I thought, why not try something?”

The UAE Team Emirates rider quickly opened a lead of a minute or so over a disinterested yellow jersey group on the Pic de Nore, and still had most of that advantage in hand when he crested the summit. On the long, long drop off the climb, however, the Sky-led peloton gradually made inroads into Martin’s buffer, seemingly more through circumstance than design. Martin was swept back up by the bunch with a little over 14 kilometres to go. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“In the end, I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m 10th on GC. I might as well try something. Who knows, maybe they’ll let me go. I don’t think they tried hard to catch me, but they were behind the motorbike and they just kind of rolled back onto me,” said Martin, already a stage winner at Mûr-de-Bretagne.

Calculation

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