Tour de France stage 1 chaotic, Ben O'Connor crashes, echelons hit main contenders

Australia Broadcast Center

3 days ago

The Tour de France cannot be won on the first of its 21 stages — but it sure can be lost.
Australian Ben O'Connor was one of several riders caught up in crashes on an incident-filled 184.9-kilometre stage starting and finishing in the northern city of Lille Métropole.
After Marijn van den Berg crashed in front of him, O'Connor had nowhere to go except over his handlebars, coming down heavily.
Fellow Aussie Kaden Groves, who was riding alongside O'Connor, had a lucky escape, bunny-hopping on his front wheel twice before scooting past the stricken van den Berg.
"We expected it to be crazy, particularly when we saw the wind direction," Jayco AlUla directeur sportif Matt Hayman told the team's in-house media after the race.
"The first day of the Tour de France is always going to be testing, so it lived up to expectations.
"Ben did a good job. He was there in the front with [teammate] Luca Mezgec.
"Actually, he was trying to stay out of trouble at that moment and sit at the back of the group … and they crashed in front of him and he went over the top."
The Jayco AlUla leader lost no time as the crash happened inside the final 5km, and the 29-year-old appeared relaxed in footage showing him warming down after the finish.
However, the long-term impacts of losing some skin so early in the race may yet hamper his chances.
Official reports stated O'Connor suffered trauma to his right knee.
"You never want to crash in the Tour de France," Hayman said.
"It could have been a lot worse. He's got some skin off. He's obviously banged up, but he gets the same time as that lead group, so not a bad time for him on GC."
The commissaires also fined Jayco AlUla 1,200 Swiss francs ($2,300) for various faux pars during the race: 700 francs for "sticky bottles" — dragging a rider along while holding a bottle from the team car — and 500 francs for Hayman not respecting the instructions of the commissaires on the route.
Jasper Philipsen won the stage in a reduced bunch sprint to claim the first yellow jersey of the race, with Aussie lead-out man Groves playing a vital role in the Alpecin-Deceuninck sprint train.
Raced at a break-neck speed throughout (the average speed was 47.5 kilometres per hour), the race was split late on after two-time winner Jonas Vingegaard's Visma-Lease a Bike squad put the power down to split the main bunch.
"There were echelons and the race split with about 25km to go," Groves told SBS.
"That's what we expected actually, and we had numbers in the front [group] who could dictate the race."
Favourites Tadej Pogačar and Vingegaard both finished in that lead group, gaining 39 seconds over the group containing other hopefuls Remco Evenepoel and Primož Roglič.
"We fell asleep a bit and, I must say, we were a bit too relaxed," Evenepoel told media at the finish.
"We kind of believed that the race was just going to be a sprint.
"[A] big mistake by us, and it's a pretty unfortunate situation."
Olympic champion Evenepoel was perhaps fortunate to stay on his bike. The frantic chase saw plenty of rough and tumble in the peloton which briefly forced the Belgian off the road.
The nerves were clear from early in the race, when Mattéo Vercher and Benjamin Thomas crashed while contesting the bonus point at the second categorised climb of the day, although both were able to continue.
Others were not so lucky.
The fetishisation of crashes in some sections of the media, particularly the Netflix documentary Tour de France Unchained, has been a bone of contention for fans of the sport.
But their impacts cannot be ignored.
Ineos Grenadiers time trial specialist Filippo Ganna was the first rider to abandon the tour after a crash early in the race.
The hour record holder initially remounted but it was later reported that he began to show concussion symptoms and was ordered to stop.
Later, Stefan Bissegger and Thibau Nys also crashed, with Bissegger also abandoning the Tour.
Nys told Eurosport the crash was "very nasty" and he might struggle to start the race tomorrow.
"I had prepared myself for the worst, and I think that's what I got," he said.
Facing riders on stage 2 is a 209.1km hilly ride from Lauwin-Planque to Boulogne-sur-mer, where the riders cut through the village of Montreuil-sur-mer, where the hero of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Jean Valjean, was the fictional mayor.