The neverending story
Merlier reigns in the chaos of Dunkerque amid crashes, Philipsen’s withdrawal and a largely uncompetitive day
Earlier articles about the 2025 Tour de France:
Few summaries of the third stage beat the one offered by the Tour de France itself: no combativity award was given.
We knew echelons would be unlikely with a headwind, but we didn’t expect the stage to unfold with quite so little action... until the intermediate sprint. Anyone hoping to headline A great battle in Dunkirk will have to save it for another year.
Tim Merlier narrowly beat Jonathan Milan by mere centimetres in a sprint that capped a day full of familiar questions — the kind that return, without fail, on flat stages in every Grand Tour: Why did no one try anything? Do the 23 teams know that, by the time we reach Paris, fewer than half of them will have won a stage? Why are these kinds of stages consistently neglected?
It’s the neverending story of recent years. Teams don’t want to waste energy on a stage destined for a sprint. The wildcard squads seem reluctant to occupy the space traditionally filled by local or smaller teams. And with two tough days behind and more still to come, the riders want to save their legs.
I get it. The problem is that after breakaways filled with strong rouleurs on stage 1 and stage 2, and with little reason for the GC teams to take responsibility today, it’s hard to understand why those teams without one of the top four or five sprinters chose to surrender in advance rather than try to make the move.
Only Bahrain made a brief effort, with Matej Mohorič. Jonas Rickaert followed for him — I thought it might be a ploy by Alpecin to avoid having to control the day — but he was quickly called back, which in turn ended Mohorič’s attack too.
I believe in the value of flat stages, even if fewer and fewer people seem to.
At the Critérium du Dauphiné, Jake Stewart showed that strong sprinters can close the gap to the elite ones when the racing is hard and fast. But in every Grand Tour, there are at least a couple of flat days where the peloton cruises below 40km/h, laughing and chatting with no meaningful racing.
The truth is that teams with good, but not great, sprinters should be the most interested in the breakaway — forcing Lidl–Trek, Alpecin and Soudal to spend resources in the chase. There aren’t 23 world-class sprinters in the race, one per team, so apart from the GC guys, quite a few teams didn’t really do their job today.
Of course, every team is free to race how they like. But it feels naïve to pin hopes on winning bunch sprints against the world’s best, and to settle for “saving the day” — when, in reality, that rarely happens. Easy days in the bunch always lead to high stress in the finale, and in real racing situations that means crashes. Lots and heavy crashes.
Joining the breakaway at least gives you a chance — something you don’t really have sitting in the peloton. But some teams seem satisfied with just picking up a few UCI points now that the top 15 score, which is fair enough. Still, it doesn’t quite match the message they use to attract sponsors: that their jersey will be seen in 190 countries, for hours on end, by millions of viewers. Sure?
Honestly, I think these stages appear to be on their way out. Not sprint finishes, of course, but flat stages with no climbs and no interest points. The peloton has evolved. Many of the fastest riders can climb now too, and as a TV product, days like this just aren’t sustainable anymore.
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