Started badly with the ascent almost halved for fear of the Mistral, the long-awaited stage of the Ventoux ended worse with Froome thrown from the saddle running on foot towards the finish line desperately looking for a new bike. It had happened that the crowd, which had climbed to the top, had poured under the Chalet Reynard, where the new finish line was located, creating an indescribable crowd along the roadside. So much so that a motorcycle from French television which is following the three-way attack by Froome, Porte and Mollema suddenly crashes.
Porte slams into it and flies to the ground, the same fate befalls Bauke Mollema and Froome. Of the three, Mollema is the one who manages to get back on the saddle before the other two. Porte has his own problems filming. Froome can't even start again because his bike is smashed. So what does the yellow jersey do? He runs like a marathon runner until he finds a spare bike, it's a perfect frame for a little guy like a jockey, not for a pole like the Briton.
However, better than nothing to reach the finish line by bike – if he had arrived on foot he would have been disqualified. And Froome arrives there but only 25th with a delay of 5'05” from the winner Thomas De Gendt – the same one who tamed the Stelvio in the 2012 Giro won by Ryder Hesjedal. His gaze between desolate and pissed off, he immediately understands that due to the total disorganization into which the Tour fell yesterday – because at least the last 3 km were not cordoned off – he lost the yellow jersey, overtaken in the standings by those rivals that he had broken off with one of his smoothies halfway up the climb.
Mollema had managed to cross the finish line a minute before Froome ahead of Adam Yates and Aru by 19 seconds, authors of a good race with the young Englishman who, stopwatch in hand, became the new yellow jersey. Froome saw not only his attack fade, but he also lost ground from Quintana who on yesterday's Ventoux had lost the shape of a condor to take on that of a quail. After the race there was chaos because the organizers no longer knew what to do: in the end, after almost an hour of uncertainty, the marshals decided to assign Froome and Porte the same time as Mollema.
A decision that immediately aroused quite a few controversies but which for the president of the jury of commissioners, Bruno Valcic, is the most correct because "the gap at the time of the accident 1,2 km from the finish was practically the same as it was recorded on the finish line between Mollema and the group governed by Adam Yates: 18 or 19 seconds. The decision could only be this since Froome and Porte were with Mollema while Quintana, Valverde and others were in Yates' group. It wouldn't have been normal for Froome, who had a 19 second lead with 1,2 km to go, to lose 2 minutes in the finale”.
Of course, a bad day for the Tour and its legend, which for all of France would become tragic in the evening with the attack in Nice.
