Sean Kelly has said while the momentum was with Thibaut Pinot (Groupama-FDJ) on the Tour de France, others could prove stronger in the final stages in the Alps.
“I think Thibaut Pinot has shown good signs coming out of
the Pyrenees. Definitely, among the general classification men he seems to be
the one with the most in the tank.
“But it can change a lot over 48 hours. During these two
days, today (Tuesday) and tomorrow it could change a lot again.
“It could be some of the other guys who get stronger as
we come into the final three very difficult days,” Kelly added of the Alpine
stages to come on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Bradley Wiggins also weighed in saying while he wanted a
British winner in Geraint Thomas, he believed Pinot was going to take yellow
into Paris.
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“My heart’s telling me G, but my head is telling me Pinot
is going to win the Tour,” he said.
“He’s only 20 odd seconds behind G now and if he
continues on the way he did the other day I see France’s first winner for 34
years.”
Wiggins had previously said, much earlier in the race, that he believed Thomas’s Team Ineos team mate Egan Bernal would win.
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Wiggins said Emanuel Buchmann (Bora-hansgrohe) was really impressive so far.
He added he was also struck at how relaxed Julian Alaphilippe (Deceuninck-QuickStep) looked when he met him yesterday.
However, he believed Deceuninck-QuickStep was trying to
do too much considering their rider was in the yellow jersey; leading out Elia
Viviani yesterday when he was 2nd to Caleb Ewan (Lotto-Soudal).
Wiggins also said that when he heard Geraint Thomas’s gears had jammed and that was what caused his crash yesterday, and saw him going “arse over tit”, he was surprised.
“That’s not good; it doesn’t fill you with a lot of
confidence, does it? This equipment is so advanced, it’s so fine tuned, the
electric gears…
“Of course you can imagine tonight there’ll be a lot of
rushing around from Shimano, their manufacturers, trying to resolve that
problem.
“That could happen at any point. Could you imagine if
that happened to Geraint in the mountains? He could lose the Tour on it.
“It’s not ideal, but these things happen. We’ve spoken
about Geraint’s mental resilience. He’ll put this to one side.
“Geraint is used to this; he’s the king of crashes, isn’t
he? This is the man who rode the Tour on a broken pelvis, I’m sure this will be
nothing to him.”
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