There were plenty of mischievous smiles, high-fives and pats on the back outside the Lidl-Trek bus in Châlon-sur-Saône. They hadn’t won the stage, but they had succeeded in throwing the cat among the pigeons on stage 12 of the Tour de France.
This was billed as the final overt bunch sprint opportunity of the race, and it was certainly heading that way until Mads Pedersen’s team first appeared at the head of the bunch with 35km to go. For the next 25km, they unleashed a relentless barrage of attacks, throwing the stage into an extended period of chaos.
The peloton eventually came back together for the expected bunch sprint, but the team were still pleased with how they raced.
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“Why not?!” sports director Kim Andersen told Cyclingnews with a big grin on his face. “I think it was nice to watch, no?”
Pedersen had been mixing it in the previous bunch sprints, but his best result had been seventh. And even if the green jersey already looked secure on his shoulders, he was keen to mix things up with the chance to perhaps pull off a heist or at the very least make the sprint teams truly earn their crust.
“If it’s just sprinters’ teams controlling the sprint, we don’t win,” Andersen explained.
“In the last days the sprints went not really like we wanted, then we say ‘ok, we try something else, and we go bananas’.”
And that’s what they did, pinging off attacks with no fewer than five riders. Quinn Simmons kicked things off on a long uncategorized incline with just over 35km to go, and Mathias Vacek was soon in a dangerous 15-man group that featured Filippo Ganna (Netcompany-Ineos).
Though that came back, they tried again on the Côte de Montagny-lès-Buxy, not an obvious flashpoint at an average gradient of 3.9% but as big a launchpad as any on the largely flat parcours.
Derek Gee-West kicked things off on that climb with a furious acceleration, with Quinn Simmons and Mathias Vacek both attacking again in turn. Again, they drew out several big names, including French champion Romain Gregoire (Groupama-FDJ-United), but it came back as the sprint teams either tried to mark the moves or chase them down.
Towards the end of the short descent of that climb, Pedersen himself hit out, launching the first of three big attacks off the front of the bunch. Even Mattias Skjelmose, 8th overall on GC, was getting involved.
“We really wanted to take a lot out of the sprinters and give them a hard time,” sports director Steven De Jongh explained. "We wanted to try to make it as hard as possible when it started to go up with 40km to go.”
They had, he revealed, planned to ignite the fireworks a several kilometres earlier than they did, but with key sprinter Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Premier Tech) off the back with a puncture, the call was made to delay.
“We wanted to wait until he was back in the bunch because it was not fair to start straight away there,” said De Jongh, who confirmed that the seeds of the plan had been sewn by Pedersen.
“Mads was asking for the terrain of the last 40km, because he could see it was a little bit up and down. As I did the full recon of the stage I could clearly give him the advice to do it from that point on. It was clear - if you wanted to do something, it was there.”
They didn’t quite pull off the heist, and it didn’t help that there was seemingly a leak of information – Decathlon CMA CGM director Mark Renshaw told us they’d got word of the impending aggression earlier in the day. But they gave it a good go, and Pedersen – who still managed ninth in the sprint – has completed his ambition of reaching the end of stage 12 in green.
“We saw a final that fits us, it’s in our DNA like this,” De Jongh said. “It would have been nice to get a group away, but the boys did well.”
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