When Fred Wright swung onto the finishing straight on Saint-Étienne’s Rue Claude Verney-Carron, he might already have suspected that the chance to claim the biggest victory of his career had already passed him by, but hope is always a durable commodity among escape artists.
The three-up sprint in the shadow of the Stade Geoffroy Guichard delivered the anticipated verdict, however. Mads Pedersen (Trek-Segafredo), the break’s strongman, won stage 13 of the Tour de France, while Wright had to settle for second ahead of Hugo Houle (Israel Premier Tech).
The Tour can break your heart, but Wright wore his disappointment lightly. His first thought on crossing the finish line was to freewheel in Pedersen’s direction, politely nudging his way through the Trek-Segafredo entourage to offer his congratulations to the day’s winner.
A little further along the street, Wright stopped against the barriers and talked a scrum of reporters through his brush with immortality. The previous day, his friend and contemporary Tom Pidcock (Ineos) won atop Alpe d’Huez and another Briton, Max Sciandri, won from a break in this city when the Tour left the Alps in 1995. The portents were promising, but Pedersen’s strength in the finale brooked no argument. Nothing to be done.
“It would’ve been pretty special to have two of us boys win two stages in a row,” said Wright, who tracked Pedersen’s decisive move with 12.5km remaining. “I mean, I knew that to beat Mads, I needed to go on that last little kicker. But I’ll be honest, I just didn’t have the legs.”
After the rigours of the previous two days in the Alps, few riders in the entire peloton had the legs to endure a day off the front as Wright did here. 50km into the stage, he succeeded in bridging across to the break of the day, and a glance at the dossards in the pace line confirmed he was in elite company. He was sure from the start the move could go the distance.
As well as Pedersen and Houle, Wright swapped turns with world time trial champion Filippo Ganna (Ineos), Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ), Quinn Simmons (Trek-Segafredo) and Matteo Jorgenson (Movistar). The rolling terrain didn’t preclude a bunch sprint, with Alpecin-Deceuninck and – at least until Caleb Ewan’s crash – Lotto Soudal giving chase, but the spoils would fall to the group of strongmen out in front.
“I was happy to make it, to be honest. I’d been saying before the stage I wanted to get into the break, but that was a hard one to get…
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