Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team manager Ralph Denk was quick to play down the incident. “There was a bit of disagreement and a language barrier, but it also happened in the heat of the moment,” he said on the Inside Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe podcast. “It wasn’t a big thing. I saw them afterwards and they’d spoken about it. They sat together at dinner and were laughing.”
Speaking to Sporza before stage seven, Evenepoel also played down his flare-up. “Everything has been spoken about, everything is set, so the past is in the past, and now we just have to look forwards.”
Like Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, Jonas Vingegaard’s Visma-Lease a Bike have said they will not be changing their strategy despite the Pyrenean mauling by Pogacar and his UAE Team Emirates team-mates. Marc Reef, their team director, suggested there were plenty of positives that they could take from the stage, “particularly how good Jonas is at the moment, physically. And how we estimate that, in relation to Pogacar, that’s they’re very closely matched,” he told Wielerflits.
Vingegaard’s insistence on wearing a mask in start and finish areas may prove to be one thing that is definitely in his favour. As was the case during the Giro d’Italia in May and the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in June, increasing numbers of riders are being affected by illness, some by fever and others by stomach issues triggered in part by the persistent heat.
Cian Uijtdebroeks, the Movistar leader, who had been troubled by a fever since the start in Barcelona, was pulled from the race by his team on Thursday after stopping to vomit on the descent from the Col d’Aspin. Over at Decathlon-CMA CGM, three key support riders for French teenager Paul Seixas are reported to be struggling with a similar ailment, according to French broadcaster Antenne 2.
Out on the road, Tim Merlier upheld Bordeaux’s long-standing tradition as a stage town that smiles on the peloton’s flat-out speedsters when he emerged from the roiling mass of sprinters that hurtled down the final straight to win stage seven of the Tour de France. The Belgian’s acceleration in the final 100 metres propelled him a bike length clear of Norway’s Soren Warenskjold, with Eritrean Biniam Girmay in third.
The victory, the Belgian’s fourth at the Tour, continued his run of winning at least one stage in every edition in which he has appeared. It also extended his Soudal Quick-Step team’s sequence of success, which dates back to 2013.
“The sprint was a mess. It was a real fight to get into position,” said Merlier, who was quick to praise his team-mates. “Like two days ago, Alpecin and us were the only ones who worked to bring the breakaway back, so I’m happy it wasn’t another team that won. In the last 600 metres it was like boxing, and I said to myself that I had to fight all the way to the finish.”