'Nerve-wracking right to the end' – How Richard Carapaz and EF Education-EasyPost hit the Tour de France jackpot on Alpe d'Huez

"To predict it would have been…imaginative." Standing next to a team car on an anonymous side road a few hundred metres away from the finish line at Alpe d'Huez with the noise of fans cheering stage winner Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) and all the other top riders in the distant background, the Ecuadorian's head DS, Charly Wegelius, is taking his time to find the right word to sum up Carapaz's victory. But that's perhaps only logical.

It's true that any stage win, be it as widely expected as a Tadej Pogačar mountain-top solo or a Remco Evenepoel time trial, quite apart from the performance itself, there's always a lengthy mix of reasons to take into account.

This time they include some serious teamwork on the Galibier, Carapaz moving away with Sepp Kuss (Visma-Lease a Bike) on the Sarenne only to be dropped near the summit, Kuss then crashing twice and indirectly providing the chance for Carapaz to move to the front, then Carapaz just holding on up the Alpe d'Huez against a counter-attacking Remco Evenepoel (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe). And even that wouldn't tell half the story, and as Wegelius suggests, the whole plotline feels almost too implausible to be forecast in any team meeting in the morning.

Yet happen it did, but the foundations were laid thanks to the initiative of the riders themselves, Wegelius says, when the team's initial goal of 'just' going for the mountains classification then morphed into a different plan.

"It feels imaginative, because of the energy expenditure over the first half of the stage when we were focusing until the top of the Telégraphe entirely on the KOM competition," Wegelius, directing the riders from the team car behind, tells Cyclingnews.

"So you know, for me even saying it on the radio after the Telégraphe, yeah, let's just reset now and try and win the stage, it felt a little bit silly.

"But they were fully into it, both of them."

'Both of them' meaning Carapaz's teammate Ben Healy, who began working furiously hard on the front of the lead breakaway to give Carapaz as much of a margin as possible by the summit, and the Ecuadorian himself, whose long turns then allowed the move to become squeezed down to himself, Kuss, Jai Hindley (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) and Juan Ayuso (Lidl-Trek).

But Wegelius also points to how Healy's groundwork "flipped the race on its head, because if he hadn't done that, we wouldn't have had the gap, right? You could see how close they came."

The touch-and-go moments were far from over then, as a chase by Pogačar, concerned about the presence of Ayuso as a distant threat to Isaac del Toro in the white jersey, got underway in the main group behind.

No one needed reminding in the EF team car that the gap of 3:30 at the foot of the Sarenne was almost exactly the same as when Pogačar let rip on Alpe d'Huez the day before, bearing down a break containing both Carapaz and Kuss before the finish.

But even after Ayuso lost ground, Decathlon CMA CGM were determined to try and drop Del Toro and put their leader Paul Seixas on the podium, and their contribution to the chase further shredded the leaders' advantage. It was only when Seixas began to flag that the remnants of the break, now down to just Kuss and Carapaz, were in with a chance.

But in yet another major plot twist, Carapaz had been left behind by the American by the summit of the Sarenne, only for Kuss to fall heavily twice on the descent, his first fall reducing the distance between himself and the EF leader, the second allowing Carapaz to move ahead by a scant 15 seconds.

"I have a lot of sympathy for Sepp; he did a brilliant race, he did his race, and that's just how cruel this sport is," Wegelius said, before denying that it detracted from Carapaz's victory.

"No, because Richard did the same corner, and he didn't crash. I feel really bad for Sepp; it's unfortunate, but it's a part of racing. It's a shame, but that's the way the races go."

Moving into the final segment of the stage and the four kilometre unclassified ascent up Alpe d'Huez, Carapaz's last challenge was an immense one, given he'd expended a colossal amount of energy, and both Kuss and Evenepoel were at far less than 30 seconds by this point.

Pogačar might have been more interested in helping Del Toro to go for a stage, but the overall runner-up was still very much on the hunt for a victory.

"It was extremely tense, because I didn't have any idea of how Sepp was after the crash. He'd been riding super fast. He got on his bike really quickly, and he was moving, so that wasn't a given," Wegelius said.

"And then obviously you had Evenepoel coming pretty fast behind, so it was a nerve-wracking situation, right up to the end."

Wegelius' role in the final ascent was limited to providing the time gaps, with just 26 seconds on Evenepoel by the line – the Belgian argued later that with a further two kilometres, he'd have caught Carapaz. But that information was really all that Carapaz needed by that point.

"In general, I'd say the riders are so committed they don't need me to tell them to try harder," Wegelius points out. "So I was just giving him the time gaps as quickly as I could and as accurately as I could. Give him what he needs to do to be himself."

Last year EF already had a hugely impressive Tour, thanks to Healy taking a long-distance stage win in the first week, then leading the race for two days with the Irishman and in 2024 Carapaz also took the mountains classification as well as a tough third-week stage.

But whether 2026 will finally be rated as more or less of a triumph for the American squad compared to the two previous years, as Wegelius points out, the foundations for those successes are laid by the entire team, not just the rider who raises his arms in triumph at the end.

It isn't just about a series of circumstances or split decisions on the road then; in reality, the often-unseen groundwork is what permits the whole scenario like Carapaz's victory to come about.

"That team effort is really what you need for this to happen," Wegelius insists, "because most of the successes we have, you can look back on it and see a lot of involvement with the team.

"You know, the first stage that Richie won in this year's race, [teammate Georg] Steinhauser rode on the flat before the first climb; he wasn't feeling great, and he was literally convinced they were his last kilometres in the race. But he just did it. And that is the kind of thing you need behind the scenes, you know, for victories like this on Alpe d'Huez to happen."

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