The third stage of the Tour de France sees the 2000-born African from Intermarché clearly beat everyone, with Gaviria and De Lie behind him while the Olympic champion sprints to conquer the symbol of the lead before tomorrow’s stage with the Galibier.
Another page of history, always on Italian roads after that triumph in the Jesi stage of the 2022 Giro.
Biniam Girmay becomes the first Eritrean to win a stage of the Tour de France, with an imperial sprint on the Turin straight, the final stage of the third and final stage entirely on the peninsula and the longest of the entire Grande Boucle, with its 230 km starting from Piacenza.
Having withdrawn from the last pink race due to that double fall in the fourth stage, the 2000 African gives Intermarché Wanty a very important victory, he who shouldn’t even have done the sprint since the sprinter designated for flat finishes is the Belgian Gerben Thijssen. All this at the end of a final chaos that followed a “quiet” day for over 150 km, before Grellier’s solo attempt, caught just under 30 km from the finish line, and the puncture that left Mathieu Van der Poel, the key man to pilot the favorite Jasper Philipsen, stranded at -6.
The Belgian from Alpecin-Deceuninck was then cut out of the game due to a group crash at -2 km; Naesen launched Sam Bennett, who however only finished 9th while Girmay managed to recover along the barriers to clearly beat a rediscovered Fernando Gaviria (Movistar) and Arnaud De Lie (Lotto-Dstny), immediately 3rd in his first sprint at the Tour ahead of Pedersen, 4th and partly disappointed like Groenewegen, who was left closed by the “Bull” champion of Belgium, with Bauhaus 6th, Jakobsen 7th and Ballerini, who in fact “replaced” captain Cavendish who never appeared in front in the final, finishing eighth.
The yellow jersey has changed again, for the third consecutive day, and once again it is a page of history as Ecuador celebrates for the first time a rider from the country with the most important symbol: and it is the star of reference of the South American nation, the Olympic champion Richard Carapaz who made his entire EF-EasyPost work for the objective, going to sprint (finishing 14th) to obtain the objective with the sum of the placings.
Tadej Pogacar, in fact, willingly gave up the jersey, placing 38th (a differential of 14 places in today’s stage classification would have been enough, there were 24), with Evenepoel and Vingegaard remaining at the same time on the eve of the first really challenging stage, from Pinerolo leaving Italy to arrive in Valloire, after having climbed Sestriere, Monginevro and above all Galibier, albeit from the softer side of the Lautaret and with the last summit less than 20 km from the gong.
