Astana’s Danish rider Jakob Fuglsang outshone defending champion Chris Froome and Australian Richie Porte to win the final stage of the Criterium du Dauphine and claim overall victory on Sunday.
Fuglsang, a silver medallist in the road race event at last year’s Rio Olympics, went into the stage in third place.
But he managed to overhaul his rivals on a gruelling mountain ride, 115km long over three cols (Saisies, Aravis, Colombiere) before a final climb to the finish line at the Plateau de Solaison, high in the Alps.
The 32-year-old Dane soloed to the stage win, finishing 12sec ahead of Ireland’s Dan Martin. Crucially, overnight leader Porte was 1min 15sec off the pace and Froome, who started the ride in second, a further 21sec adrift.
Fuglsang’s victory meant he leapfrogged Porte in the overall standings, the Australian claiming second at 10sec with Martin rounding out the podium by 1sec from Froome, the three-time Tour de France winner.
“It’s amazing! I don’t know what to say. Even with the jersey I can’t believe it, I’ve been close to the yellow jersey many times in my career,” Fuglsang said, dedicating the win to his pregnant wife.
“We tried to keep our positions on GC and it came down to a big big fight for the overall victory.
“We planned it very well with Fabio (Aru) attacking (with Alejandro Valverde on the Col de la Colombiere) and everything went in our favour.
“We played really smart. Froome had to pull after Fabio and ‘Valv’. I tried to keep cool all day, and without pushing too much I went for the stage win and I got it all.”
The Dane said the victory was a warning shot at rival teams for the July 1-23 Tour de France.
“There’s still a long way to the Tour but I’m really happy with my condition now. I’ll have to take it easy onto the Tour,” he said.
“With Fabio we’ll form a good couple for the Tour. We’ll share the leadership and we have a good team.”
– ‘Right direction’ –
Froome will go into his Tour defence next month without a single win to his name this season, in stark contrast to the last four years when he had won at least two stage races leading up to the Grand Boucle.
“Everyone knew it was going to be a really aggressive day of racing,” said Froome.
“For us we weren’t here to try and protect second place -– we wanted to race for the win today.
“Even though it didn’t pay off in the end I think we’ve got to be happy with that.
“I came here looking for a hard week of racing and that’s exactly what I got. I only had 19 days of racing before the Dauphine so I’m really light on racing.
“Hopefully this will move me on now as well in terms of preparations for July.”
Froome added: “If I look at where I was a few weeks ago at the Tour of Romandie I seemed to be a long way off the pace.
“Here I feel as if I’ve got better and better over the week and at least I’m heading in the right direction. I feel as if I’m on track for July.”
Team Sky sporting director Nicolas Portal insisted Froome would have more to offer come the Tour de France.
“We came here to try to win, and we saw Richie was super strong, and now we can see Fuglsang was clearly very strong too,” he said.
“These two riders were slightly better than us but the team rode fantastic every day.”
Portal added: “Froomey is on the way up, step by step to the Tour. For sure he’s going to progress.”
