A year after thrilling his home nation for two weeks on the Tour de France, a tearful Julian Alaphilippe on Sunday produced an almost carbon-copy capture of a stage win to claim the maillot jaune once again.
On the day’s final climb, Alaphilippe launched a blistering attack to clinch bonus seconds at the summit, before a white-knuckle descent to the finish line in Nice also gave him bonus time.
Alaphilippe, described by former winner Geraint Thomas during last year’s race as the “darling of France,” leads Britain’s Adam Yates, who accompanied him on his wild dash from distance, by just four seconds.
Photo: AP
The main overall contenders are 17 seconds adrift.
“I just wanted to dedicate this victory to my dad. It was important to me,” said a tearful Alaphilippe, whose father, Jo, passed away in June.
Former soldier Alaphilippe began punching toward the sky at the finish line as he turned to see just how close behind him the onrushing peloton was to overtaking his escaping trio on the Promenade des Anglais.
The setup of the second stage was eerily close to how Alaphilippe stole away from the peloton last year on day three to Epernay and eventually led the Tour for 14 days, before wilting on the penultimate stage to finish fifth overall.
No Frenchman has won the Tour de France since 1985.
“I really wanted to try something and I had nothing to lose,” the Deceuninck-Quick Step leader said. “It really hurt me, I was digging deep at the end there. It’s a great pride and responsibility, and I will defend this honor day by day, I won’t be giving it up tomorrow that’s for sure.”
While Alaphilippe celebrated, it was a bad day for Team Jumbo-Visma.
Shortly after Alaphilippe’s attack, Michal Kwiatkowski of Team Ineos somehow backed into Jumbo-Visma joint team leader Tom Dumoulin and knocked him to the floor.
The former Giro d’Italia winner dusted himself off as Kwiatkowski apologized profusely, but his teammates were slow to react.
The Dutch outfit had been leading the peloton all day, but suddenly they slowed down and abandoned their pursuit of Alaphilippe, who had Switzerland’s Marc Hirschi and Yates for company on the tense 15-minute dash to the line.
“In the end I was never going to win the sprint, but to come third on stage two, I’m pretty happy with that,” Yates said.
The man who started the day in the maillot jaune, Norway’s Alexander Kristoff, finished way off the pace after the peloton had to negotiate two category 1 climbs, but he did retain the leading sprinter’s maillot vert.
“I didn’t want to hurt my chances of winning a sprint later in the Tour by pushing too hard in the hills,” he said.
Taiwanese world No. 1 women’s doubles star Hsieh Su-wei on Saturday overcame a first-set loss to win her opening match at the Madrid Open. Top seeds Hsieh and partner Elise Mertens of Belgium, with whom she last month won her fourth Indian Wells women’s doubles title, bounced back from a rocky first set to beat Asia Muhammad of the US and Aldila Sutjiadi of Indonesia 2-6, 6-4, 10-2. Hsieh and Mertens were next to face Heather Watson of the UK and Xu Yifan of China in the round of 16. Thirty-eight-year-old Hsieh last month reclaimed her world No. 1 spot after her Indian
EYES ON THE PRIZE: Armed with three solid men’s singles shuttlers and doubles Olympic champions, Taiwan aim to make their first Thomas Cup semi-final, Chou Tien-chen said Taiwanese badminton star Tai Tzu-ying yesterday quickly dispatched Malaysia’s Goh Jin Wei in straight sets, while her male counterpart Chou Tien-chen beat Germany’s Kai Schaefer, as Taiwan’s women’s and men’s teams won their Group B opening rounds of the TotalEnergies BWF Thomas and Uber Cup Finals in Chengdu, China. World No. 5 Tai beat Goh 21-19, 22-20 in a speedy 33 minutes, her fourth straight victory over the world No. 24 shuttler since they first faced each other in the quarter-finals of the 2018 Malaysia Open, where Tai went on to win the women’s singles title. Malaysia followed up Tai’s opening victory
Chen Yi-tung (陳奕通) secured a historic Olympic berth on Sunday by winning the senior men’s foil event at the 2024 Asia Oceania Zonal Olympic Fencing Qualifiers in United Arab Emirates. Chen defeated Samuel Elijah of Singapore 15-4 in the final in Dubai to secure the only wild card in the event, making him the first male Olympian fencer from Taiwan in 36 years and only the sixth Taiwanese fencer to ever qualify for the quadrennial event. The last appearance by a Taiwanese male fencer at the Olympics was in 1988, when Wang San-tsai (王三財) and Cheng Ming-hsiang (鄭明祥) competed in Seoul. The
Rafael Nadal on Tuesday lost in straight sets to 31st-ranked Jiri Lehecka in the fourth round at the Madrid Open, while Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei advanced to the semi-finals in the women’s doubles. Nadal said that he was feeling good about his progress following his latest injury layoff. Nadal called it a “positive week” in every way and said his body held up well. “I was able to play four matches, a couple of tough matches,” Nadal said. “So very positive, winning three matches, playing four matches at the high level of tennis. I enjoyed a lot playing at home. I leave here with