Tour de France. Philipsen postpones Cavendish’s dream

There is nothing unavoidable in cycling, sometimes opportunities materialize even when they weren’t foreseen and a bicycle gives you the opportunity to swerve aside, take routes you didn’t think were possible. Sometimes it’s easier to make the imagination come true, sometimes a little less, much less. Like when the road is flat, there are no climbs, it’s thirty-five degrees and the wind is hot from the south. Today there had to be a sprint finish, it was difficult for it to go otherwise. Someone tried it anyway, Pierre Latour and Nans Peters, taken 78 kilometers from the finish, gave some concern, not too many. It was flown. AND Jasper Philipsen won again: three wins out of three, one hundred percent effectivedespite the not entirely correct calculations made by his team.

Alpecin-Deceuninck hadn’t been able to prepare the finale very well. So many curves, a bridge, a narrow road, it was easy to get lost, especially after getting scared for Latour and Peters with still more than a minute to fifteen kilometers from the finish. Four men for just over a kilometer and a half, at the end of the first week, is never enough. But those were there. Mathieu van der Poel once again tried to do the champion number, going almost sixty per hour for half a kilometre. It can do a lot, van der Poel, not everything. He got up a hundred meters early. In that moment Mark Cavendish attempted the surprise hit. The idea was great, the rendering very good, but not good enough. Jasper Philipsen, he intuited, he understood, he chased (cleverly slowing down – staying within the limits of sportsmanship – Girmay), he overtook him.

Jasper Philipsen says that “we all hope Cavendish can get his 35th Tour de France victory”, the one that would make him the most successful rider at the Grande Boucle, “but I’m here to do the best for myself and for the team”. And he hopes to continue to do so. And not just for the win. Philipsen is Belgian, it was launched by Axel Merckx, it has the legend of Eddy Merckx in its heart and that is enough to try to avoid in every way that Cav can overcome it.

Mark Cavendish will keep trying, he admitted it at the end of the stage, it could only be like this. They gave him up for finished three years ago, he’s still looking for the victory that would hoist him among the like him no one ever. He says he owes it to himself and to the team. Cavendish knows well that sprints are won alone, but not really alone, that sprints are also a community affair, that alone you don’t go anywhere.

And not just in the sprint.

To reach Bordeaux, as soon as the stage started, they found themselves in front of four: Jonas Abrahamsen, Mathieu Burgaudeau, Simon Guglielmi and Nelson Oliveira. The group had lost interest in them, had let them be. The four looked at each other, maybe they wondered what are four of us doing here in front of there are so many behind? Abrahamsen immediately stepped aside, immediately after Oliveira did the same. It took Burgaudeau a kilometer longer to decide whether to continue or not. Then he slowed down too. Simon Gueglielmi she tried to talk to him, to convince him to continue, not to abandon him. Because a destiny already written, a bucking through the Girondin countryside without any hope of arriving before the others, it is better to do it in two, provided that the saying that common pain is half joy is true. It isn’t, but so-called folk wisdom is often just credulity. He failed to convince him, Burgaudeau rejoined the group, Simon Guglielmi continued alone. One hundred and twenty kilometers of desolate and very sweet solitude.

In the heraldry of Bordeaux it is written: “The lilies, alone, hold up the moon, the waves, the castle and the lion”. Gueglielmi ruled the moon, the waves, the castle and the lion. He alone held up the hope, quite impromptu, that genius, will and courage can lead to the enterprise. Many believed in Romanticism. A little less now. Perhaps among these is Guglielmi, lily of Bordeaux, the last of the romantics.

Tour de France 2023, 7th stage: the order of arrival and the general classification