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.
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