Asgreen hails escape quartet as Tour de France sprinters miss a beat

AFP | Bourg-en-Bresse                  

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Dane Kasper Asgreen won stage 18 of the Tour de France yesterday as a long range escape edged a fast-closing peloton to the line at Bourg-en-Bresse.

Another Dane , Jonas Vingegaard, retained his 7min 35sec lead atop the overall standings. As the Tour returned to flat terrain, three members of a four-man escape group crossed the line just metres ahead of the elite sprinters.

Dutchman Pascal Eenkhoorn of Lotto-Dstny was second and Norwegian Jonas Abrahamsen of Uno-X was third. Their escape companion Belgian Victor Campenaerts, who had ridden hard to give team-mate Eenkhoorn a winning chance, was engulfed by the peloton at the line to show what a close call it was after a 20km chase fell short.

Asgreen, a 28-year-old, dedicated the victory to his escape partners after they combined in an alliance of fortune that delivered the win for only one of them. “We raced the end like a team time-trial,” said Asgreen, part of the Danish team time-trial world champions of 2018. “We realised that if we all committed we could pull it off,” he said.

“I couldn’t have done it without the others. Even a small group can manage to cheat the sprinters,” said Asgreen, who broke away to win the Tour of Flanders in 2021. The victory was the first for his Soudal-Quick-Stepteam on this Tour. The Belgian outfit have enjoyed years of dom[1]inance with riders such as Julian Alaphilippe and Mark Cavendish.