tour de france 2024: stage 10
by Rémy Rossi
Feuilles de laurier
The sleepy day from Orléans to Saint-Amand-Montrond wasn’t blessed with a breakway to spice things up. The quixotic escapes on flat stages at least give the impression that there’s a flavorful mix of action in the meantime, soon to boil over with drama in the final kilometers.
Breakaways on stages like these are analagous to bay leaves in stews. Will they make a difference in the end? Probably not. Do we still put them in at the request of recipe books and director sportifs? Absolutely, yes. There’s a certain elegance and old-timey charm to adding whole leaves to soups and broths, as well as blindly following French culinary mandates (they do know what they’re doing, of course). But home chefs and pelotons get cheeky every once in a while and accidently forget (read: boldy decide) to forgo bay leaves. Today, the bunch didn’t boil any sacrificial bay leaves in the Centre-Val de Loire heat. And the stew still sprinted.
Van der Pull
It’s a banal description of such a high-adreneline moment, but the finale of Stage 10 witnessed a textbook leadout from Alpecin-Deceuninck. Teammate and designated lastman Mathieu van der Poel fired his last cyclinders with 450 meters to go and dropped Jasper Philipsen off in perfect position, having successfully led through the tricky bend to the finish. Seeing the World Champ stripes dangling in front of you— turning himself inside out— has got to be an effective carrot.
We all assumed Philipsen had the raw power to win a stage (or a few) at this year’s Tour but his missteps have cost him so far in the race. Expectations were high after his quartet of Tour victories last year so maybe the pressure was getting to him. But that sounds too much like a narrative the cycling media simply loooves to spin. Sprint finishes are fucking hard, man. But Alpecin-Deceuninck finally got it right and showed their strength in a dominant fashion. Jasper’s other less-than-perfect traits are once again pardoned by his sprinting prowess and, in the end, that’s what matters in a race.
I’m not sure I can handle seeing more photos of the Alpecin’s horrendous demin-inspired gray kit, though. Now who thought that was a good idea?
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