Jasper Philipsen came off Mathieu van der Poel’s wheel to launch an unanswerable sprint to win stage 16 of the Tour de France in Voiron.
The day had been one of the most chaotic of this year’s Tour with attacks, counter-attacks and splits throughout the day.
But eventually a reduced front group containing several sprinters including Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek), Michael Matthews (Jayco-AlUla) and Aaron Gates (Astana-XDS) contested the victory.
Philipsen’s victory injected new vigour into the competition for the Tour’s green jersey because the leader of that competition Mads Pedersen was only able to place eighth.
The Alpecin-Premier Tech sprinter is now just seven points behind Pedersen.
The day had been marked by chaos that saw the break take 75km to form. One of the major animators of that was Pedersen who seemed to want to be in every group that tried to go clear. He’d be awarded the most combative rider prize at the end of the day.
He was rewarded for those efforts by taking maximum 25 points at the intermediate sprint, which was placed 147km into the 175km stage.
More to follow…
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