Richard Carapaz launched a decisive attack during the final climb to Orcieres-Merlette to secure a solo victory in stage 18 of \u2060the Tour de France.<\/p>\n
The EF Education-EasyPost rider spread his arms in celebration as he crossed the finish line 45 seconds before second-placed Mauro Schmid, while Matteo Jorgenson came in third.<\/p>\n
Overall leader Tadej Pogacar and other general classification contenders did not challenge for the stage and finished over four minutes later. The Slovenian retained his lead of four minutes and 32 seconds over his nearest rival Remco Evenepoel.<\/p>\n
Carapaz, with the ninth Grand \u200cTour stage win of \u2060his career, rose to 10th position overall.<\/p>\n
His team-mate Ben Healy was among a group two minutes and 44 seconds down on Carapaz, with the Irish rider moving up four places to 58th in the general classification.<\/p>\n
The riders started fast despite the mountainous terrain testing them in the 185.2km ride from Voiron, covering 42.5km in the first hour.<\/p>\n
Points classification leader Mads Pedersen, whose advantage was cut down to just seven points after Jasper Philipsen won stage 17, consolidated \u200chis position as he joined an early breakaway group, eyeing the intermediate sprint.<\/p>\n
No one challenged the Danish green jersey holder \u2060as he launched a late attack to win the sprint, increasing his lead \u200cover Philipsen to 32 points, before dropping back. The top 10 \u2060riders in the \u200cgeneral classification were meanwhile sitting comfortably in the peloton, unperturbed as they fell over eight minutes behind the leaders with 30km to go.<\/p>\n
The peloton started to pick up the pace as they neared \u2060the climb to Cote de Saint-Leger-les-Melezes, while the six-man leading group, including Jorgenson, Carapaz \u2060and French climber Valentin Paret-Peintre, sped up to keep the chasers at bay.<\/p>\n
During the final ascent to Orcieres-Merlette, Carapaz broke away from the group with 3.5km left in the stage. The others failed to keep up as the 33-year-old built a lead of 37 seconds going into the final kilometre, ensuring a comfortable victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Richard Carapaz launched a decisive attack during the final climb to Orcieres-Merlette to secure a solo victory in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565267,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-565266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}