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Dan Martin has said he felt much better on yesterday’s stage of the Tour de France and was determined to make a few efforts to test himself, which he was forced into when the field split due to crashes.
The Israel Start-Up Nation rider added the fight for position was getting earlier all the time and started not long after the halfway point of yesterday’s 182.9km race from Lorient to Pontivy.
And while there were comments after the stage - and after the final crash - about the sweeping bend at the finish, Martin said everyone knew it was coming and nobody had complained about it in advance.
There were serious crashes early in the
race and another two with 9km to go and 4km to go before the final crash in the
sprint for the stage win.
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“Today the fight started with about 80km to go. At one point, as pointy elbows and hefty shoulders came to the fore at the front of the peloton, a wry smile broke across my face when I realised the town we were flying through was aptly named ‘Josselen’,” Martin said in his Irish Independent Tour de France diary.
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Martin also noted that when he was riding the Tour
earlier in his career, the race spent most of the time on wide roads, unlike
the very narrow roads of Brittany in the last few stages.
He added the teams of the general classification riders
were so keen to be at the front of avoid any splits in the field that it was
slowing the sprinters’ teams as they tried to chase the breakaway, which was
gaining time as a result.
Martin said when he found himself on the wrong side of a
split due to a crash, he put in a few efforts to “open my legs up a bit again”
“We just regained contact with the front group with
around 5km to go, where I looked down at my computer on the downhill leading
into the finish and saw that we were doing almost 80kph
without pedaling,” he said, adding the crash with 4km to occurred just
after that.
“It really wasn’t nice to be riding through all those
bodies again today,” he added. “From there on, it was just a case of our group
of survivors rolling to the line and getting the day over with.
“We got out of the way as Roglic and Miguel Angel Lopez
stormed past with 2km remaining, their team-mates trying to limit
their losses and save their Tour.”
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