Defending Tour de France champion Egan Bernal on Monday marked out his territory by climbing to a summit finish victory on stage 3 of the Route d’Occitanie.
Bernal’s Ineos teammate Pavel Sivakov was second at 10 seconds with Team Astana’s Aleksandr Vlasov, while Chris Froome trailed home five minutes adrift less than a month ahead of the rescheduled Tour.
The Colombian punched the air joyously as he soloed over the finish line to rapturous applause from the fans, who had defied a traffic ban by walking or cycling to the mountain summit finale.
Photo: AFP
Bernal also clinched the overall lead of the four-day race, on a stage typical of those found on the Tour with about 40km of difficult climbs.
“The team did a really good lead out and I attacked in the last part of the climb,” said Bernal, who then tipped one of his teammates to ride his debut Tour. “It was practically just two Team Ineos riders at the end.”
“Pavel was impressive,” Bernal added. “He has improved his level a lot since last season and he will be a key rider in the Tour de France.”
A household name in his homeland since winning last year’s Tour, Bernal warmed up for that by taking the overall victory in the Paris-Nice and Tour de Suisse, and seems to be the favorite to win this season’s race.
“This is a test day for all the favorites of the Tour,” France’s Thibaut Pinot said ahead of the stage in which he finished fourth, 31 seconds behind the 23-year-old winner.
“I’m more than happy with my climb,” said Pinot, who was welcomed at the summit by a huge cheer from the fans.
French climber Romain Bardet, who fell heavily on Sunday, was 1 minute, 18 seconds off the winner.
After negotiating the narrow lanes in the Pyrenean foothills, the race went up the 10km of the Col de Peyresourde at an average grade of 7.5 percent, then ascended the slightly longer Col de Beyrede at a 7.2 percent grade.
Die-hard cyclo-tourists and those fit enough to go up on foot had defied the 24-hour traffic ban on the day’s final climb.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier