British journeyman Stephen Cummings earned South African team MTN-Qhubeka a landmark victory on Mandela Day when he spoiled a French party to take a surprise win in the 14th stage of the Tour de France on Saturday, while overall leader Chris Froome was doused in urine.
Cummings beat Thibaut Pinot into second place and Romain Bardet into third, powering past the two Frenchmen inside the final kilometer while both were marking each other thinking the race was between the two of them with French President Francois Hollande watching from the race director’s car.
Cummings, riding for the first African team on the Tour de France, even had time to raise his arms in celebration after staying in touch with his French rivals on the final climb, a 3km ascent at an average gradient of 10.1 percent.
Photo: AFP
“We had special meeting this morning [because of Mandela Day] and we had special helmets on, it was a big motivation,” Cummings said. “It was a long shot and luckily I played it well.”
“He was very crafty,” Bardet said. “Very disappointed.”
Being doused in liquids by roadside fans goes with the terrain of being a Tour de France rider, but the spectator yelling “doper” at Froome and the liquid could not have been more unwelcome.
Photo: Reuters
“No mistake, it was urine,” the race leader said.
While Stage 14 signaled a double celebration for British cycling, with Froome extending his lead, the unpleasant assault dampened the leader’s mood.
Froome blamed “very irresponsible” reporters for turning public opinion against him and Team Sky. Just as he did in winning the Tour for the first time in 2013, the Kenya-born Briton has faced pointed questions about his dominant performances — and those of his teammates — along with insinuations of doping.
Froome said he spotted the spectator acting bizarrely about a third of the way into the day’s 178km west-to-east ride from Rodez to Mende, France. The route through plains and hills on the fringes of the Massif Central region included a detour through the breathtakingly spectacular Gorges du Tarn.
“I saw this guy just peering around and I thought: ‘That looks a bit strange,’” Froome said. “As I got there he just sort of launched this cup toward me and said [in French] ‘Doper.’ That’s unacceptable on so many levels.”
His Sky teammate Richie Porte said another person, also seemingly a spectator, thumped him with a “full-on punch” a few days earlier on a climb in the Pyrenees. Porte suggested journalists might be putting riders in danger by “whipping up all the rubbish that they are.”
Froome echoed that thinking.
“I certainly wouldn’t blame the public for this,” he said. “I would blame some of the reporting on the race that has been very irresponsible. It is no longer the riders who are bringing the sport into disrepute now, it’s those individuals and they know who they are.”
He refused to identify specific journalists or reports, but said: “They set that tone to people and obviously people believe what they see in the media.”
Although such assaults remain rare, Froome is not the first rider in Tour history to have been doused by urine, nor is Porte the first to be punched. Still, the aggression shows how their generation is paying the price for decades of damage done by dopers, none more infamous than Lance Armstrong, who was stripped of seven Tour victories and confessed to systematic cheating after years of lying.
In the lingering atmosphere of distrust, Froome’s repeated assurances that he is clean have fallen on deaf ears.
“Unfortunately, this is the legacy that has been handed to us by the people before us, people who have won the Tour only to disappoint fans a few years later,” Froome said. “If this is part of the process we have to go through to get the sport to the better place, obviously I’m here, I’m doing it. I’m not going to give up the race because a few guys are shouting insults.”
Especially when only the Alps loom as the last major obstacle between the 2013 winner and a second victory in Paris on Sunday.
On a fiercely steep final climb to an airfield above Mende, Froome again proved untouchable. While the other podium contenders labored up the 3km, Froome caught Nairo Quintana and, to show who is the boss, beat the Colombian with a finishing sprint.
“Every little second will help,” Froome said. “I thought I might as well give a little nudge for the line, see if I could take another second or two.”
He took one second from Quintana and more from the others, who are, in effect, now competing for second and third spot on the Champs-Elysees.
Tejay van Garderen of the US, the leader of the BMC Racing Team, suffered most on the climb among the big names. From second overall at the start of the stage, he slipped to third and is now 3 minutes, 32 seconds off Froome’s pace.
Quintana vaulted from third to second place, but trails Froome by 3:10, a comfortable cushion for the British rider to carry into the Alps later this week.
Bayer 04 Leverkusen go into today’s match at TSG 1899 Hoffenheim stung from their first league defeat in 16 months. Leverkusen were beaten 3-2 at home by RB Leipzig before the international break, the first loss since May last year for the reigning league and cup champions. While any defeat, particularly against a likely title rival, would have disappointed coach Xabi Alonso, the way in which it happened would be most concerning. Just as they did in the Supercup against VfB Stuttgart and in the league opener to Borussia Moenchengladbach, Leverkusen scored first, but were pegged back. However, while Leverkusen rallied late to
If all goes well when the biggest marathon field ever gathered in Australia races 42km through the streets of Sydney on Sunday, World Marathon Majors (WMM) will soon add a seventh race to the elite series. The Sydney Marathon is to become the first race since Tokyo in 2013 to join long-established majors in New York, London, Boston, Berlin and Chicago if it passes the WMM assessment criteria for the second straight year. “We’re really excited for Sunday to arrive,” race director Wayne Larden told a news conference in Sydney yesterday. “We’re prepared, we’re ready. All of our plans look good on
The lights dimmed and the crowd hushed as Karoline Kristensen entered for her performance. However, this was no ordinary Dutch theater: The temperature was 80°C and the audience naked apart from a towel. Dressed in a swimsuit and to the tune of emotional music, the 21-year-old Kristensen started her routine, performed inside a large sauna, with a bed of hot rocks in the middle. For a week this month, a group of wellness practitioners, called “sauna masters,” are gathering at a picturesque health resort in the Netherlands to compete in this year’s Aufguss world sauna championships. The practice takes its name from a
When details from a scientific experiment that could have helped clear Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva landed at the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the leader of the organization’s reaction was unequivocal: “We have to stop that urgently,” he wrote. No mention of the test ever became public and Valieva’s defense at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) went on without it. What effect the information could have had on Valieva’s case is unclear, but without it, the skater, then 15 years old, was eventually disqualified from the 2022 Winter Olympics after testing positive for a banned heart medication that would later
RSS