Category: Cycling

• European champion pipped Italian to the line for victory

• Tadej Pogacar remains top of general classification

Tim Merlier out-sprinted Jonathan Milan to victory on stage nine of the Tour de France after Mathieu van der Poel almost pulled off an audacious win in Chateauroux.

Van der Poel had rolled off the front of the peloton alongside his Alpecin–Deceuninck teammate Jonas Rickaert at the start of the 174km stage from Chinon in what looked a certain suicide mission, but the Dutchman held off the chasing pack until the final few hundred metres.

Jeremy Whittle’s report from Chateauroux to follow

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• Italian holds on to pink jersey on closing run to Imola

• Liane Lippert pips Anna van der Breggen in late burst

Elisa Longo Borghini has retained her Giro d’Italia Women title, holding on to the pink jersey she claimed on Saturday’s queen stage as the race concluded at Imola.

Longo Borghini (Team UAE ADQ) sealed her second victory at her home Grand Tour, after losing just four bonus seconds to Switzerland’s Marlen Reusser (Movistar) on the final stage, winning the title by 18 seconds overall.

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Tadej Pogacar prevailed on the final climb to Mûr-de-Bretagne, holding off Jonas Vingegaard with Britain’s Oscar Onley finishing in third place

• Read Jeremy Whittle’s stage seven report from Mûr-de-Bretagne

Oscar Onley: The Scottish Picnic PostalNL rider is 11th on General Classification but his team boss said on Wednesday that he’s more interested in the 22-year-old from Kelso trying to nick a stage win or two than finishing high up the GC. Onley is a good climber and today’s is a stage he’ll have marked down as a potential win.

Christian Prudhomme on today’s stage: “The peloton’s stay in Brittany will kick off with another contest between the puncheurs,” said the race director. “After leaving Saint-Malo and heading for Saint-Brieuc, history buffs will recall the exploits of Bernard Hinault as the race passes through his home village of Yffiniac.

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Remco Evenepoel justified his red hot favouritism and Tadej Pogacar took the oiverall race lead on a bad day at the office for Jonas Vingegaard

• Read Jeremy Whittle’s stage five report from Caen

An intriguing sub-plot: Still eligible for the best young rider (under-25) category, Remco Evenepoel is the odds-on favourite to win today’s stage but should the Belgian endure a rare bad day at the ITT office, there’s a decent chance Scotland’s very own Oscar Onley could take the white jersey.

Riding in only his second Tour de France, the 22-year-old from Perth is a highly commendable seventh overall on General Classification but is only 29 seconds behind Kevin Vauquelin, who is currently in possession of the garment and will have plenty of support as he rides today’s ITT on his home roads of Normandy. It’s a tall order but a big performance from Oscar (and a poor one from Remco) could see the Picnic PostNL rider wrestle the white jersey from the Frenchman’s shoulders.

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The defending champion held off his challengers on the road to Rouen but Mathieu van der Poel stayed in yellow

160 km to go: Van der Poel takes a comfort break as the peloton deigns to the race leader and sits up. Asgreen is giving everything up the hill as he chases that trio of escapees.

Huw Morgan gets in touch: “Just been to Amiens to watch the depart. Always a strange experience “watching” cycling live. We drove an hour and 10 minutes for our 10 month old baby to basically gawp at a 150 young men on their bikes. Wout and Pogacar stopped right in front of us so we feel lucky. My wife’s sense from watching them all at the start was that Jonas looks good and Pogacar looks good. We expect a Royal rumble in Rouen.”

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Bernard Hinault was the last home champion as the sport has gone international, with winners from Colombia and Slovenia

Age is not just about the policemen getting younger and trying to figure out how to operate an iPhone. It may also be when you are able to tell your children that you once saw an actual French cyclist wearing the actual yellow jersey of the Tour de France having actually just won la grande boucle.

It’s 39 years, 11 months and about three weeks since I watched a tired and slightly diminished-looking Bernard Hinault get out of a car in a backstreet in Lisieux – once the massive crowd pressing on the car doors had been moved on by the heavies – before pulling on that maillot jaune, getting wearily on to his bike, before spinning past, time after time in the late-evening sunlight in the town’s annual post-Tour critérium, an exhibition race which still takes place on the first Tuesday after the Tour.

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Tadej Pogacar’s UAE team and Jonas Vingegaard’s Visma lead the way but watch out for Soudal-QuickStep

Two men, Mathieu van der Poel and Jasper Philipsen, with one plan: stage wins and the green jersey; VDP is the big star, but in recent Tours de France it’s been “Jasper Disaster” who has delivered. On the flat stages, VDP uses his explosive power and superlative bike handling to lead out Philipsen, who has won nine stages in the last three Tours and the green jersey in 2023. Anywhere a bit lumpy will be for VDP, although he has taken only one Tour stage in his career. That was at Mûr de Bretagne in 2021, so watch out for him when the Tour returns there on 11 July.

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On the 50th anniversary of the first Tour finish on the Champs-Élysées, we could be in for a cliffhanger finish

The climbs of Mont Cassel and Le Mont Noir won’t be enough to split the peloton, so this is almost guaranteed to be a bunch sprint, unless it gets windy. A strong westerly would make this a nightmare with more than 140km of crosswinds, but if it stays calm it’s a first big test for Jasper Philipsen, Tim Merlier and the other fast men. For the favourites, a first day of trying to stay upright.

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From LeMond’s astonishing comeback to Cavendish’s four victories, the final dash up the great avenue is now part of race folklore

It is impossible now to conceive of the Tour de France without two things: the race leader’s yellow jersey and the finale on the Champs-Élysées, a spectacle that is half a century old this summer. The finish has moved away from the great avenue once in the last 50 years, during the Olympic buildup in 2024, and the Tour cannot really be imagined without that final dash up the great avenue with its high-end shops and cafes, its gardens and plane trees.

The Tour had always finished in Paris, postwar on the velodromes at the Parc des Princes and the Cipale velodrome in the Bois de Vincennes, and it had frequently used the Champs for a ceremonial start; the idea for an “apotheosis” on the great avenue seems to have been inspired by the 1974 Giro d’Italia, which included a circuit race within Milan. The suggestion came from a television presenter, Yves Mourosi, who then had the honour of announcing the venture on his 1pm news show in November 1974.

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Gary Imlach prepares for one final race as La Grande Boucle moves behind a paywall after 40 years on ITV and Channel 4

When the last rider rolls across the Tour de France finish line in Paris on 27 July it will mark more than the end of the world’s most prestigious bike race. Once Gary Imlach and team have wrapped up, it will conclude four decades of free-to-air Tour coverage for British TV viewers.

While the sport, and the technology used to broadcast it, have transformed since the 1980s, the excellence of the ITV programme (previously on Channel 4) has been constant.

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The Tour de France stage winner talks in detail for the first time about transitioning when her cycling career ended, growing up in the Gorbals and alienation in the peloton

Pippa York used to be Robert Millar, a stage winner and king of the mountains in the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia. Millar was also a podium finisher, in both the Vuelta a España and the Giro, a British national champion, and Tour of Britain winner. But Millar had also wanted to be a girl since the age of five, a secret that remained buried throughout childhood in Glasgow, the subsequent racing career, and beyond, into mid-life.

In her new book, The Escape, written in collaboration with David Walsh, the 66-year-old unflinchingly documents the long and painful process towards transition and the isolation, fear and loneliness that went with it.

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• New Zealander claims overall victory at the last

• Lorena Wiebes takes the stage win for SD Worx-Protime

The teenage prodigy Cat Ferguson came within a hair’s breadth of executing a memorable overall win in her debut Tour of Britain, but was outsprinted by her rival Ally Wollaston at the climax of the final stage in Glasgow.

The pair came into the final sprint tied on time, after Wollaston had erased the 19-year-old Ferguson’s overall lead. Bonus seconds for third place in the final sprint, behind the stage winner, Lorena Wiebes, was enough for the New Zealander to snatch the overall win.

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• Young British rider takes penultimate stage and GC lead

• Former leader Kim Le Court among those to abandon

The 19-year-old Cat Ferguson prevailed in foul conditions at the finish to claim victory on a crash-packed stage three of the Women’s Tour of Britain and with it the general classification lead. It was her first UCI Women’s World Tour stage victory.

Ferguson (Movistar) from Skipton, North Yorkshire, surged clear across the cobbles in Kelso to lead home a British one-two in front of Josie Nelson (Picnic-PostNL). New Zealand’s Ally Wollaston (FDJ-Suez) finished third, with the Dutch rider Karlijn Swinkels (UAE Team ADQ) in fourth.

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