Luke Rowe has commended the peloton at the Tour de France for neutralising some of the descents on stage 1 today in the rain, but pointedly excluded Astana from those remarks.
After a whole series of crashes, Rowe and other riders went on the front and effectively neutralised the race until it got through the technical descents after there were so many crashes.
However, a number of Astana riders pushed on a little on one descent and while doing so its leader Miguel Angel Lopez locked his wheels and went face-first into a lamppost on the roadside.
Thankfully he was uninjured but Rowe of Ineos Grenadiers clearly wasn’t impressed at the finish.
"I have to say 'chapeau' to the whole peloton, minus
Astana to hit it down one climb, and as a result, their leader was left on his
back,” he said.
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“They made themselves look pretty stupid but apart from them, chapeau to the whole peloton.”
Rowe added the fact the rain came down today, for the first time in months in the southern France region, made the roads very slippy.
“I think that the problem is that it hasn’t rained here
for two or three months, literally. Then you have one day when it rains and it
was like ice. I think that most teams, at least half their teams, have touched
down today. Luckily we passed it,” Rowe said.
“We had a couple of touchdowns but in general we came through.
We got this riders organisation, or group, and there are a couple of guys from
each team in there.
“And we spoke about it last night with how we’d approach
the Tour de France in general and look after each other and do the right thing
when needed.
"Whilst you want to race and put on the best show, you could see how many crashes there were and that was with the three descents at a very careful speed.”
One of the fallers today was Rowe's team mate Pavel Sivakov; the Russian crashing twice and finding himself off the back on his own by a distance. He eventually limped home in the last group on the road over 13 minutes down.
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