Evenepoel abandons Tour de France
The Soudal-Quick Step rider, who was third overall, stepped off his bike and entered his team car midway through the ascent of the Col du Tourmalet, the first of four climbs on the day's menu.
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Reuters
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Olympic champion Zheng withdraws from U.S. Open after elbow surgery
July 21 (Reuters) - Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen has withdrawn from the U.S. Open as she recovers from right elbow surgery, tournament organisers announced Monday. The world number six revealed last week on Instagram that she has been struggling with "persistent pain" in her right elbow, which affected her performance during both training and matches. After exploring various treatments with little success, Zheng decided to undergo arthroscopic surgery following consultations with elbow specialists and her support team. She has since announced she will be taking a short break from competition to focus on her recovery. The 22-year-old Chinese star enjoyed a remarkable run last year, capturing gold at the Paris Olympics and reaching the final of the 2024 Australian Open. However, her momentum was halted at Wimbledon this year, where she was eliminated in the first round by Czech player Katerina Siniakova earlier in July. With Zheng's withdrawal, France's Leolia Jeanjean will move into the main draw of the U.S. Open, the final Grand Slam of the season, which begins with main draw action on August 24 in New York.
The Guardian
7 hours ago
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Terrifying Mont Ventoux ready to create the unexpected again in Tour de France
The decades pass, generations of Tour de France cyclists come and go, but some gruesome things never change. On Tuesday, the survivors of one of the craziest, fastest Tours ever, a race with even less respite than usual, will do as their predecessors have done every few years since 1951: they will crest a rise in the road, and see Mont Ventoux on the horizon. A sinking in the heart will accompany the dull ache in the legs: we're off to the Bald Mountain once again. The men of the Tour probably won't be thankful for small mercies, but they should be. Last time the Tour visited, in 2021, although the background scenario was the same – Tadej Pogacar had smashed the race to bits on the first serious climb and was set fair for victory – the organisers cruelly made them go over the 1,910m summit twice, in two different ways. Wout van Aert might recall that with a wry smile: the Belgian was in his prime back then and he won out of a breakaway. The time before that, in 2016, the chaos on the mountain was such that the man who was Pogifying the race that year, Chris Froome, ran part of the way to the finish, which had been moved off the summit due to high winds. Froome might recall that utterly freakish episode with a wry smile from his home in Monaco, but it will be tinged with regret that at 40 he probably won't be racing up the Giant of Provence again. Tempora mutantur, but not the Ventoux. That, partly, reflects one of the key features of the Tour; the way it constantly revisits and rewrites its past in places that have barely changed since the first visit. Go round the partly banked corner at Saint-Estève and on to the virtually straight haul through the oak-wooded lower slopes, and it's essentially the same brutal experience that the stars of the 50s, 60s and 70s might have undergone, perhaps with better tarmac as you go up with barely a hairpin to break the gradient until the final haul across the scree slopes to the top. The Ventoux is a place where stuff happens on the Tour, very little of it good, beginning with Jean Malléjac's near-death in 1955 and continuing with Tom Simpson's dramatic demise in 1967. That event, which I investigated in my 2002 biography of Simpson, Put Me Back on My Bike, remains the mountain's defining moment, lending a note of pilgrimage to every ascent to the desolate waste of wind- and frost-blasted limestone scree on its pointed summit. The generation that raced with Simpson has largely passed on – the death in April of Barry Hoban being a case in point – but the poignancy of his death and the tales around it lose nothing in the telling. Equally memorable, if with a touch of farce, was the Froome fiasco in 2016. Froome slipping and sliding in his stiff-soled carbon shoes and clicking pedal cleats with a huge crowd baying at him was probably the most outlandish event I witnessed in 27 Tours, and the feeling then was that this kind of thing could happen only in one of three places, all equally extreme: the Ventoux, l'Alpe d'Huez, and the rarely visited extinct volcano of Le Puy de Dôme in the Massif Central. After all, it wasn't that long since, in 2000, most of the race infrastructure had had to be left behind due to dangerous, but not freak, high winds, meaning that when Marco Pantani won ahead of Lance Armstrong, the finish felt like a return to the 1970s. Given the extreme physical challenge and the sumptuous television images it provides, it's not surprising that the mountain now hosts the Tour far more often than of old, pretty much matching l'Alpe d'Huez for frequency whereas in the 80s and 90s, one visit per decade was deemed enough. The one major change in recent years concerns not the mountain itself but the area around it. Recently, the newspaper l'Equipe documented how cycling up the Ventoux is now front and centre of the local economy, with more than 90,000 cyclists each year pedalling up its slopes by the most traditional route, the southerly road from Bédoin which opens earlier in the year than the northerly route from Malaucène. On the last two visits I made to the mountain, I'd have expected the slopes to be busy when I rode up one June, but less so on a bitter October day when light snow was falling at the observatory. Cycle cafes, cycle hire businesses and major players in the cycle industry cater for the two-wheeled hordes, far beyond the traditional stop-off point at Chalet Reynard, where the thermometer was reputed to have broken on the boiling day Simpson died. There are three dedicated photographers who make a living from selling photographs to those who ride up each day, turning over €130,000 annually in one case, not to mention the local businesses that feed and accommodate the cyclists plus major mass participation events such as sportives and gran fondos; the strangest, perhaps, being the 'brotherhood of the Ventoux nutters', membership of which goes to those who have ridden up the Ventoux three times in a single day using each of the three different ways to the summit. Given the Tour's constant pursuit of new and televisually interesting challenges, it's probably only a matter of time until the race follows suit.
The Guardian
12 hours ago
- The Guardian
Vingegaard still believes in Tour de France chances despite Pogacar dominance
Jonas Vingegaard may be more than four minutes behind the overall race leader Tadej Pogacar in this year's Tour de France, but the Dane still believes he can win. As the race heads towards the endgame, with Tuesday's summit finish on Mont Ventoux the prelude to a gruelling trawl through the Alps, the big question however, is does his team still believe? 'I do still think that I can win,' Vingegaard said during the Tour's second rest day in Montpellier. 'It looks very hard, but I still think I can do it.' As Pogacar's biggest rival, the Visma-Lease a Bike rider is obliged to believe. But after Sunday's stage to Carcassonne, which saw the double Tour champion deserted by some of his teammates just when he needed them most, the task of overthrowing Pogacar looks doubly daunting. 'We have to try to do something,' he said and insisted that he was willing to risk everything to win. 'There needs to be a weakness somewhere on Tadej's part. For now, we haven't found it, but we'll keep trying. I'm willing to sacrifice second place to go for first.' But if he is to achieve an unlikely coup, he will need more convincing support that he has received to date. Sunday's debacle, which saw Vingegaard chasing back after a crash, while others in his team drove the pace at the front, prompted much soul-searching in Denmark. Bjarne Riis, the first Dane to win the Tour in 1996, who subsequently confessed to doping, blasted Vingegaard's teammates when speaking to Danish newspaper BT. 'Their racing style is completely hopeless,' he said. 'I don't understand it at all. After Sunday's stage, you have to wonder whether Jonas should look for another team. They clearly don't see him as a priority. That's disappointing to see.' Echoing comments made by Vingegaard's wife, and personal manager, Trine Vingegaard Hansen, before the Tour began, Riis added: 'Wout Van Aert is clearly more interested in riding his own Tour than in helping Vingegaard.' 'The management has promised Van Aert that he can do what he wants, and that is going to cause conflicts. Give Jonas some respect.' Meanwhile a relaxed Pogacar was enthusing about the happy atmosphere within his own team, saying: 'I'm really enjoying this Tour. The group that we have here, the teammates and on the bus, at dinner, breakfast, it's super nice. If I need to come to the Tour every year, I'll just come for the boys and the atmosphere and nothing else.' Pogacar is confident of final victory. 'I mean, I have to be,' he said. But he remains respectful towards his Danish rival. 'I'm pretty sure that Jonas can be confident as well, because he's in really good shape. I need to keep focused, I need to keep eating well, sleeping well, and keep this mood that we have in this group, keep up the motivation.' 'I think it's going to be tough,' Pogacar added, 'but we are ready for a fight with everybody, especially with Jonas.' Pogacar added that he felt this year's route was designed to 'scare' him and favour Vingegaard. 'We've been to Hautacam and we are going to Mont Ventoux and Col de la Loze, where Jonas dropped me [in the past] all three times. 'I actually like all these climbs. I like Mont Ventoux, it's super iconic, and Col de la Loze is one of the hardest climbs I've ever done in my career. I will not say that I'm looking for revenge – I just want to have better legs than in the past.'
