Healy takes yellow jersey as Yates wins stage
Paris
Irishman Ben Healy rode himself into the yellow jersey with an outstanding display of grit and power as Simon Yates won stage 10 of the Tour de France from a breakaway on the Puy de Sancy on Monday.
A monster Bastille Day stage through the Massif Central delivered the fireworks as Healy put in a huge shift in the break to maintain a sizeable gap over the chasing peloton, fighting his way to third on the stage and then counting the seconds until Tadej Pogacar finished.
Pogacar put in a late dig as he traded blows with rival Jonas Vingegaard, but when the world champion came in four minutes 51 seconds behind Yates, 4:20 behind Healy, the yellow jersey swapped shoulders with Healy 29 seconds better off going into Tuesday's rest day.
Yates profited as he followed Healy's lead for most of the last 20 kilometres, then distanced him on the climb to the finish, but the biggest grin was on the face of the 24-year-old EF Education-EasyPost man who became the fourth Irishman to wear yellow and the first since Stephen Roche in 1987.
'It was insanely tough, it was a battle against myself really,' Healy said. 'I just had to dig deep. My team-mates put in so much work today, Harry (Sweeny) and Alex (Baudin), I really, really wanted to pay them back and I'm happy I could do that in the end.
'I kind of gambled a bit. I had the stage win in the bank and how often do you get the opportunity to put yourself into yellow so I felt I had to take that and really go for it.' With the peloton made to wait an extra 24 hours for their first rest day, race organizers put a monster challenge in their way with eight categorised climbs and 4,500 metres of elevation on the 165km stage from Ennezat - ideal territory for a breakaway.
A group of 29 eventually got away but were given little rope until they were whittled down to a more focused group of 17 midway through the stage, with the gap growing sufficiently to give Healy a hope of yellow.
He got the message, abandoning the ambition of doubling up on his stage six victory and putting all of his efforts into powering on what became a group of just six riders, maintaining the gap to the peloton at more than five-and-a-half minutes almost until the foot of the 3.3kilometres climb to the finish.
That was the moment for Yates, the Giro d'Italia winner who came to the Tour to support Vingegaard, to launch attack, quickly distancing Healy and holding off Thymen Arensman to win his third career Tour stage.
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