Alberto Bettiol apologised to his EF Education-EasyPost teammates for riding on the front of the peloton in the company of Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) on the cobbles on stage 5 of the Tour de France, but he has hit back against Robbie McEwen’s insinuation that he had deliberately collaborated with the Slovenian.
In his role as an analyst for Eurosport, McEwen questioned Alberto Bettiol’s tactics, given that his teammates Neilson Powless and Magnus Cort were up the road in what proved to be the winning break. “You can only assume that he's possibly going to UAE next year,” McEwen said.
Bettiol dismissed the suggestion when he spoke with reporters before the start of stage 6 in Binche. “McEwen is not a rider anymore, he’s a journalist,” Bettiol said. “It’s part of his game.”
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Bettiol took up the reins at the head of the chasing group on the cobbles with a little under 30km to go, when his teammates Cort and Powless were 1:25 ahead in the break of the day. His acceleration at the front, with Pogačar tucked in behind him, helped to shave some seconds off that advantage, though the Italian relented soon afterwards.
The break would stay clear, with Powless placing 4th on the stage, though the American ultimately fell 13 seconds short of divesting Wout van Aert (Jumbo-Visma) of the yellow jersey.
“I work for EF Education First. I have the contract. I just tried one time to split the peloton where I was. In the end, it was a mistake and I said sorry to Neilson,” Bettiol said of his effort. “But I am ok with the team and ok with everything.
“I was feeling really good, and I actually didn’t know Neilson was contesting the yellow jersey. Anyway, I was feeling strong, and I gave it one go to try to destroy the peloton, because then I would have had the opportunity not to pull because I had Neilson and Magnus in the front. In the end, it didn’t affect the GC race a lot and Neilson was still in the front.”
EF Education-EasyPost manager Jonathan Vaughters tweeted during Wednesday’s stage that his team’s post-race debrief would be “interesting”, implying in jest that it would make interesting material for the Tour's Netflix series. He confirmed on Thursday morning that Bettiol had apologised to his teammates afterwards.
“I’m not going to disclose what we talk about in a debrief because it’s a private debrief, but let’s say it took longer than it normally would. In the end, we came to a good conclusion, and we came out of it a unified team. It took a while to get there, but we got there,” said Vaughters, who suggested Bettiol, who has been blighted by illness since his 2019 Tour of Flanders victory, was guilty of little more than a surfeit of enthusiasm.
“He’s had to deal with some incredibly difficult health issues, issues that for a lot of people would have ended their career. He really hasn’t been at the front of a race and had really good legs for a long time. He just got into a situation where he was overly excited and kind of forgot himself a little, but he’ll own it and say, ‘I made a mistake.’ He owns that and apologised to his teammates and said, ‘I got a little bit too excited.’”
Vaughters added that Bettiol’s acceleration ultimately did not have a detrimental impact on Powless’ bid to claim the maillot jaune, as Van Aert was 45 seconds further behind at that point. The Belgian later chased back on and limited his losses to both the winning move and the late attacker Pogačar, saving his yellow jersey by 13 seconds from Powless.
“If you see the race, Van Aert was in the third group at the time,” Vaughters said when asked if Bettiol’s effort had cost Powless the yellow jersey. “If it was Pogačar in yellow, then yes, you would be right. But Van Aert is in the yellow jersey, and he was behind and then came back at the end. So if you look at it, statistically and mathematically, we didn’t lose the yellow jersey because of Alberto.”
