The Polish chess grandmaster Savielly Tartakower once said, “The winner of a chess game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.”
With 600m to go in stage 10 of the 2023 Tour de France, Bahrain Victorious rider Pello Bilbao found himself with the kind of decision that will win or lose a bike race, but which also only becomes clear with the benefit of hindsight. The situation was this: Bilbao was in the wheel of Intermarché-Circus-Wanty’s Georg Zimmerman, a little clear of a quartet of riders. However, the key information was that Zimmerman and Bilbao were slowing, and the four riders behind were gaining, especially Ben O’Connor of Ag2r Citroën, who had separated him from the other three. Six hundred metres is too far from the line to sprint, too close to the line to decelerate, and the perfect distance to give the rider you’re considering passing a really great leadout, especially as by the time you’ve read this far, they were 550 metres from the line. Five hundred and twenty-five metres is a great distance for chasing riders to not only close gaps, but slingshot past.
Read more: Stage 10 of the 2023 Tour de France: The weird and the wonderful
Bilbao went through, which was risky, because it’s safe to say that if he’d stayed on the front, he would not have won the stage. However, with O’Connor still gaining, Zimmerman panicked and went through, with 400m to go. This gave Bilbao shelter at the perfect moment, and when Zimmerman launched the sprint with 250m to go, the Basque rider was able to jump past and take the victory. He’d made the next-to-last mistake, but thankfully for him, Zimmerman had made the last one.
Stage 10 was the archetypal day for the break. It had a hilly parcours through the Massif Central that was too hard for any sprinters to hope to win, though Alpecin-Deceuninck spent a portion of the third quarter of the stage riding as if they thought Jasper Philipsen might have a chance. It was, on paper, too straightforward for a real GC battle, though in the very early stages, Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogačar and his team-mate Adam Yates, and Simon Yates, found themselves riding hard in a break, 40 seconds clear of a peloton being led by a panicking Bora-Hansgrohe and Ineos Grenadiers. It was lucky for Ineos that Bora’s Jai Hindley had missed the split, and lucky for Bora that Ineos’ Carlos Rodríguez and Tom Pidcock had done the same – if either team had got a leader up there with the Yates…