Tour de Suisse overall contender Kévin Vauquelin (Arkéa-B&B Hotels) has pulled no punches in his criticisms of race leader Romain Grégoire (Groupama-FDJ) over their lack of collaboration in the mountains of stage 4 to keep overall threat João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) under control.
Starting as pre-race favourite, Almeida was virtually ruled out of the overall battle after a disastrous opening stage where on technical, rainsoaked hilly terrain he lost more than three minutes to stage winner Grégoire.
However, the Portuguese star has come sailing back into the GC battle after he launched a 48 kilometre solo attack on Wednesday's opening mountain stage that netted him a spectacular lone victory.
Vauquelin was only trailing Almeida by 20 seconds on the summit of the toughest climb of the day, the cat.1 Splügenpass, but he eventually crossed the line 1:10 down on the Portuguese racer, in the same time as Grégoire.
Almeida has now bounced back to seventh overall, 2:07 down, and could well regain more time on Thursday's ultra-mountainous stage. Vauquelin, meanwhile, remains at 25 seconds on Grégoire, but with some newly acquired reasons, in his opinion, to be unhappy with his compatriot's strategy, which he claims has allowed Almeida back into the 2025 Suisse GC game.
"When I attacked to bridge across to [chasers] Oscar Onley and Ben O'Connor, I asked Romain to work with me, and he said he couldn't. Then when I attacked again, he told me he'd got choices to make," Vauquelin recounted to L'Equipe after the stage.
"He decided to shadow me, just like he does in every race. It's a pity, because if between three and six riders had decided to work, Almeida wouldn't have stayed away.
"We had bigger fish to fry and in the sprint for the line, we maybe showed we were the two best. You have to respect it [his strategy], but it sucks. We've lost a lot of time pointlessly."
'I owe him a drink'
Grégoire, perhaps predictably, took a very different point of view, explaining that losing time on Almeida, O'Connor and Onley was not a big deal for him as he had few hopes of maintaining the lead all the way through to Sunday's time trial. For him, a short-term gain of being more certain of holding onto yellow for another day was more important than gambling on his chances on GC.
"My objective was to keep it for another stage, so that's why I concentrated on Kévin," he told L'Équipe He also thanked compatriot and theoretical rival Julian Alaphilippe (Tudor), for collaborating with him on the stage to limit the damage. saying: "He saved me from a really bad day. I owe him a drink."
Meanwhile UAE Team Emirates-XRG were logically none too upset about how the top two riders on GC had failed to work against a common threat like Almeida, with sports director Simone Pedrazzini telling L'Équipe, "It's better for us. We hoped they wouldn't collaborate and that's what happened. Now we've got a bit more hope."
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