I’ll be the first to admit, when I saw Ramunas Navardauskas bridging up to his teammate Tom Slagter in the last 14 kilometers while dragging the rest of the peloton up to him, I thought it was a questionable move. It was inevitable Slagter was about to be caught and there was no way that Navardauskas was going to stay away so far from the finish with all the sprinters licking their lips.
Was I ever wrong. It was brilliant.
The peloton works in mysterious ways sometimes and with wet twisting roads nobody couldn’t get organised enough for a proper chase. A momentary lull in the peloton when Slagter was caught was all that was needed for Navardauskas to build his gap. The crash that brought down Peter Sagan and much of the peloton most certainly helped his chances and the outcome could have been very different, but nothing risked, nothing gained. Seeing Navardauskas pull this one off is what makes bike racing such an unpredictable and amazing spectacle at times.
Read the full race report and results from Stage 19 of the 2014 Tour de France here.
Enjoy the photos from stage 19 courtesy of BrakeThrough Media (follow on Instagram and Twitter) and Cor Vos.