The sprint that almost wasn't
On paper, stage 12 was the simplest day of this Tour: 179 flat kilometres from the old Formula 1 circuit at Magny-Cours to a drag race in Chalon-sur-Saône. Nobody told Lidl-Trek. For the final 40 kilometres they threw rider after rider up the road — Quinn Simmons, Mathias Vacek, Mattias Skjelmose, Mads Pedersen — snapping the peloton into pieces and shredding every lead-out train in it.
It all came back together, barely. Then a crash inside the final kilometre split the sprint in two. And through all of it, Tim Merlier did what Tim Merlier does: waited, launched from deep, and beat Olav Kooij and Jasper Philipsen to the line for his third stage win of this Tour.
How it unfolded
Baptiste Veistroffer was the day's lone escapee, dangling two minutes ahead for most of the afternoon and hoovering up 25 intermediate sprint points for his trouble. He was swallowed up right as Lidl-Trek went to work — and their aggression was really about green: Pedersen took the intermediate sprint and stretched his points lead to 337, 55 clear of Biniam Girmay, who took fourth on the stage.
The day's real casualty was Fernando Gaviria, down in the final-kilometre crash and out of the race with a fractured collarbone. The grupetto rides one sprinter lighter tomorrow.
No change at the top: Tadej Pogačar stays in yellow, and the full standings are on our Tour tracker.
Straight from the finish line
Three sprints contested at nearly 50 an hour, three wins. When it's chaos everywhere else, the calmest man in the bunch keeps cashing in.
