On a tight leash: Is there still hope for the breakaway riders at the Tour de France?

Another day, another doomed stage for the breakaway. One of the overarching themes of this Tour de France has been the insatiable appetite of teams in the peloton to shut down any attempts to win by getting into the break, be it for GC riders on mountainous terrain, or the sprinter teams on flat days. 

On stage 15, it was Visma-Lease a Bike’s turn to be the break’s party poopers, the team working virtually all day to bring back a group with enough firepower that you’d usually expect to make it to the finish. By the time they’d brought the break’s advantage down to 2:15 by the foot of the final Plateau de Beille climb, it was clear their days were numbered; then their fate was sealed for sure when Jonas Vingegaard went all in early with an attack 10.5km from the finish. Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) battled bravely in an unlikely attempt to survive, but he was caught and promptly dropped by the charging Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) with over 9km still to ride. Ultimately, neither he nor the rest of the break came close.

Cast your mind back two weeks, and the early signs were that this would be a good Tour for breakaway riders. The opening stage treated us to the universally popular sight of a pair of underdogs in Team DSM-Firmenich PostNL’s Romain Bardet and Frank van den Broek defying the odds to hold off a charging peloton. Then, the next day, Kévin Vauquelin (Arkéa - B&B Hotels) proved to be the best of an 11-man group that were given a big enough gap to make it to the finish. 

Since then, however, only one of the subsequent 12 road stages have seen the victory go to a breakaway rider — stage nine, when Anthony Turgis (TotalEnergies) emerged from the chaos on the gravel roads triumphant. 

While you’d usually expect the sprinter teams to almost invariably control the flat stages during the first two weeks, what’s been unusual about this Tour is how all of the mountain stages up until now have seen all early breaks fail. The trend was set on stage four’s brief visit into the Alps, when UAE Team Emirates kept the break on a tight leash to set up Pogačar for his first victory of this year’s Tour. Cannibalistic as he is, Pogačar again set his team to work on the stage in the Massif Central to Villeneuve-sur-Lot earlier this week (when he was pipped to the line by Vingegaard), then yesterday’s first day in the Pyrenees. In part, he's been targeting the bonus seconds on offer for the stage winner on the finish line; but also, surely, he’s motivated by a basic love of winning. 

We saw a similar approach at the Giro d’Italia, when it wasn't until the penultimate mountain stage of the whole race that a break managed to succeed in this terrain, in a stage won by EF Education-EasyPost’s Georg Steinhauser, Pogačar having already won the previous three. He wasn’t even done then, either, as he again put his teammates to work to set him up for victory on the Monte Grappa stage. For any riders hoping to succeed from a breakaway in the Tour’s final week, that doesn’t bode well; at this rate, we’ll start seeing the same lack of enthusiasm to get into the break that has characterised the flat stages this year extending to the mountain stages too.

There certainly wasn’t a lack of enthusiasm today, however. The break that got up the road was notable for the high calibre of riders that were in it, as many of the world’s best climbers who had fallen out of GC contention in the first two weeks used the many Pyrenean summits of this stage to try and bounce back with a breakaway win. Near the summit of the penultimate climb of the day, Col d’Agnes, four riders were at the front of the race, containing two winners of the Giro d’Italia in Jai Hindley and Richard Carapaz, a multiple Vuelta a España podium finisher in Enric Mas (Movistar), and Ineos Grenadiers' super-domestique Laurens De Plus. 

Another Grand Tour winner, Simon Yates (Jayco-Alula) might have accompanied them had he not complacently missed a split in the break that occurred during a long valley road in the middle of the stage, while the occasion of Bastille Day encouraged French riders like Guillaume Martin (Cofidis) and David Gaudu (Groupama-FDJ) to try and get into the break. 

Some of the teams were particularly well organised in trying to engineer a stage win, too. Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe had worked hard all day to make the break work, getting Bob Jungels and Matteo Sobrero to accompany Hindley and set as fast a pace as possible to try and hold off the peloton. And EF Education-EasyPost were as lively as ever, with the irrepressible Ben Healy also helping out the very strong-looking Carapaz. 

Yet for all their efforts, they didn’t even come close to a stage win, with Carapaz the highest placed finisher in ninth, 5:41 behind Pogačar. Many of these riders will surely try again in the Alpine stages, with three opportunities (stages 17, 19 and 20) offering the right terrain for the same kind of climbers. They will hope that, with the GC hierarchy more settled, UAE Team Emirates and Visma-Lease a Bike will ease off a bit and allow some more leeway to the breaks. 

However, if the Tour continues in this same manner and the GC teams remain insatiable, then it’s the hilly stages of the final week, rather than the mountain stages, that are better off targeted. The three stages that have seen the break succeed have all come in hilly terrain, which in particular resembles next week’s stage 18, which featured five category three climbs and plenty of undulating roads in between. From breakaway specialists to climbers coming into form, the multitude of riders who aren’t among the few still in the race for a top finish on GC, stage 18, and potentially even the flatter stage 16, could become the most hectic and chaotic of the whole Tour when it comes to battle to get into the break. There’s hope for breakaway riders yet.