[jyl]

Number 32!

Long wide boulevard. Classic bunch sprint, all the sprint teams lined up and the GC teams backed off after 3 km leaving the field to the sprinters. DQS had its whole team pulling on the left, with two rival sprinters, Bol and Colbrelli, hanging on Cav’s wheel. Cav seems like a bad one to draft, being so small and flicky. Alpecin had their train pulling on the right with MVP’s yellow jersey as their locomotive. MVP pulled off, the sprint kicked off, Alpecin’s remaining train drifted toward the left, DQS met it in the middle of the road. That eliminated almost all the other sprinters who found themselves trapped in the compressed middle mass. Alpecin’s final leadout man pulled his sprinter Phillipsen to the front, Morkov pulled Cav up to Phillipsen, Cav jumped to the right off Morkov to catch Phillipsen’s wheel just as Phillipsen launched and became Cav’s launchpad. Phillipsen was moving faster than Morkov and also the wind was from the left. Cav came around Phillipsen on the right as Bouhanni came from quite a way back to round Phillipsen on the left. Bouhanni had been a ways back on the right so I’m not sure how he got through the clog, that was impressive. The three drag raced, Cav’s lead held and he won by half a bike length, I think Bouhanni got second (?).

It was a controlled sprint, everyone got to organize their trains and execute their plan, clean sprinting and pure speed won out. Alpecin should probably switch back to Merlier for the next flat sprint instead of riding for Phillipsen, who Cav beat repeatedly in the Tour of Turkey. Bouhanni is fast but his team doesn’t seem to do a good train or leadout for him, he’s always alone when the final acceleration kicks off. Cav actually mentioned that in his post race interview: he said he didn’t understand if a (French) team brings a sprinter, why the whole team doesn’t ride for him on a nailed-on sprint stage like this? Almost every DQS rider was in Cav’s train, even Alaphillipe who is in GC contention was riding his heart out for the sprint. It looked like the old Highroad train!

Chateauroux is where Cav won his first Tour stage in 2008. He remembers every sprint finish there, was talking to the interviewer about how the 2008 finish was further up the road and with a small grade, a subsequent finish was earlier on the road, he has a memory for sprints like a high speed camera.

This didn’t feel like a close one. Cav didn’t need his second kick like I thought he might have used in stage 4. He looked pretty dominant.

I wonder if he’ll be back at DQS in 2022? Lefevre has bashed Bennett pretty hard and talk is they are parting ways at season end. But Cav will be 37 y/o. Maybe it depends on if he’s reached 34 Tour stages, even if he keeps saying that doesn’t matter to him.

No idea what happened on GC but I assume it was basically a recovery day for those guys.