Wout van Aert wins stage 5 as Yates takes yellow – Tour de France
Tour de France 2020
Stage 5
Wout van Aert made it two-from-two for his purring Jumbo-Visma team with victory in Stage 5 of the Tour de France at Privas as Julian Alaphilippe lost the yellow jersey in controversial circumstances to Adam Yates after incurring a time penalty for an illegal feed.
It seemed perhaps fitting that the biggest drama of an otherwise uneventful day came once the dust had barely settled on the 183km transitional ride through the undulating Drome region of France.
No sooner had the in-form Belgian van Aert finished celebrating his team’s second win in as many days than the race jury announced that a 20-second penalty had been imposed on Frenchman Alaphilippe for taking on an illegal water bottle from a Deceuninck-QuickStep soigneur with 17km remaining, contrary to the regulations.
With Alaphilippe dropping to sixteenth place in the standings, Britain’s Yates (Mitchelton-Scott) takes control of the Tour for the first time in his career. Trailing the Frenchman by four seconds in the overnight standings, Yates now leads the race by three seconds on van Aert’s Jumbo-Visma teammate, the Slovenian Primoz Roglic.
Van Aert, the in-form Belgian, powered past Dutchman Cees Bol of Team Sunweb to win by half a wheel one day after helping guide Roglic to victory in Tuesday’s first summit finish.
“It was a hectic finish,” van Aert said. “It was maybe the most easy stage I’ve done in a cycling race because there was no breakaway and the pace was not high. I was happy to be given the chance to go for it. And if you have one shot and you can finish it off then it’s even more sweet. I have my stage win now so from now on I will support my team even more than before.”
Ireland’s Sam Bennett (Deceuninck-QuickStep) edged Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgrohe) for third place to wrest the green jersey off the Slovakian’s back – becoming the first Irishman since Sean Kelly 31 years ago to don the Tour’s maillot vert.
Bennett had already sowed the seeds of his green heist by winning the intermediate sprint earlier in the stage, with Sagan only able to come fourth. He now leads Sagan by nine points as the former triple world champion faces serious opposition in his quest to win an eighth green jersey in nine years.
On a day when the peloton took advantage of a relatively gentle parcours with a pedestrian pace, the pick of the action was saved for the final kilometres. An otherwise drab affair came to a crescendo with a chaotic finish featuring plenty of road furniture, blustery conditions, and a number of roundabouts as van Aert enjoyed a rare occasion to ride for himself.
A crash involving Jumbo-Visma’s Sepp Kuss inside the final 20km saw the Ineos Grenadiers team of Colombian defending champion Egan Bernal up the tempo until their Ecuadorian rider Richard Carapaz picked up a puncture.
The Sunweb team of towering Dutchman Bol then came to the fore and seemed to control the final sprint as the road narrowed dramatically ahead of the flamme rouge.
But van Aert, the 25-year-old winner of Milano-Sanremo and Strade Bianche, made light work of the slight uphill sprint to power past Bol on the blind corner ahead of finish and snare the second Tour stage win of his career.
Belgian Jasper Stuyven (Trek-Segafredo) completed the top 10 as Australia’s Caleb Ewan (Lotto Soudal) failed to hit the heights that saw him surge to Stage 3 success on Monday.
With no breakaway forming on the long transitional schlep away from the Alps, Frenchman Benoit Cosnefroy (Ag2R-La Mondiale) was able to pick up the single point available over the summit of both Cat.4 climbs to extend his lead in the nascent polka dot jersey standings.
The Tour continues on Thursday with the 191km Stage 6 from Le Teil to Mont Aigoual, where the battle for the yellow jersey should intensify once again on the race’s second summit finish – a chance, perhaps, for Alaphilippe to take back the lead he lost on a technicality.
