Tour de France stage 3: Ineos and Jumbo count the cost of injuries

Geraint Thomas
(Image credit: Getty Images)

The most innocuous looking days of the Tour de France have long proved to be the most treacherous. The saying among the peloton is always that the Tour is the hardest race of the year because you can’t stop concentrating for even a second. There’s so much stress in the bunch, that anything can happen. And true to form, the Tour hadn’t even rolled out of Brittany after the grand départ and Ineos Grenadiers and Jumbo-Visma will both be wondering quite how their riders have taken such a beating in less than three days of racing, after another day of chaos, carnage and mayhem to Pontivy on stage 3.

For Ineos, the team who have been the defining squad of the Tour over the last decade, winning seven yellow jerseys since 2012, they’ve have endured more time losses and crashes than any other time in their 11-year history in the Tour at this early point in the race, with Geraint Thomas’s crash on stage 3 potentially leaving management considering a strategic rethink. For Jumbo, almost all of their riders have hit the deck in the opening three days, but it is injuries to team leader Primož Roglič and road captain Robert Gesink, the latter who was due to be a major support for his leader in the mountains and was forced to abandon the race, that will have provided the biggest cause to panic.

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Sophie Hurcom is Procycling’s deputy editor. She joined the magazine in 2017, after working at Cycling Weekly where she started on work experience before becoming a sub editor, and then news and features writer. Prior to that, she graduated from City University London with a Masters degree in magazine journalism. Sophie has since reported from races all over the world, including multiple  Tours de France, where she was thrown in at the deep end by making her race debut in 2014 on the stage that Chris Froome crashed out on the Roubaix cobbles.