Michael Mørkøv has built a deserved reputation as the best lead-out man in professional cycling, but his shepherding duties are not confined to the tight spaces of the final kilometre. This July, he has also been guiding his QuickStep-AlphaVinyl sprinter Fabio Jakobsen through the vast, lonesome expanses of the high mountains.
The Alps are a forbidding sort of a place for a sprinter at the best of times. On this Tour de France, the white heat of the current canicule and the red-hot pace imposed by Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard et al have combined to make the high mountains feel rather more akin to the lower circles of Hell.
“The racing this year in the Tour has been very extreme,” Mørkøv told Cyclingnews in Saint-Étienne on Saturday. “The first part of the race has been super fast. And the stages in the Alps were tough for us, because in front they were deciding the GC and that made it really fast.”
Mørkøv spent stage 11 pacing and cajoling Jakobsen over the Col du Télégraphe, Col du Galibier and Col du Granon, battling to make the time limit. They reached the summit of the final climb just inside the cut, a little over 40 minutes down on Vingegaard. A day later, they again propped up the field at Alpe d’Huez with a more or less identical deficit on the winner Tom Pidcock (Ineos Grenadiers). This may be no Tour for fast men, but that doesn’t mean they ever get a day off.
“Of course, during the day we are worried about the time limit, because we never know what it is before the first rider has finished, so we can only estimate what it will be,” Mørkøv said of their close encounter with finishing hors délai on the Granon.
“The whole day, we were under pressure to stay within the time limit, but then when we reached the final climb, once Jonas had won the stage, we knew the time cut. After that, we could manage our energy to finish within the time limit.”
Mørkøv’s track pedigree stands him in good stead amid the tumult of Tour finales, where men like Jakobsen, Mark Cavendish and Alexander Kristoff have placed their utmost trust in his judgement to guide them through the swirling mass of bikes and bodies and swear words. In the mountains, his inherent calm and his ability to calculate on the hoof makes him equally valuable as a sherpa.
“I just try to encourage Jakob and motivate him and make him believe in my calculations,” Mørkøv said. “I’m always calculating exactly what we need to do for each kilometre on the…
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