Fabio Jakobsen appeared on the list of the QuickStep-Alpha Vinyl stable thanks to his now more than ten victories, which was “taken away” by Mark Cavendish, who ended up staying home. He repaid his team’s trust in the opening sprint, winning ahead of Wout van Aert and Mads Pedersen.
“For me it was a gradual process, step by step, and this is my way of repaying everyone for the support. Fortunately, I can still win,” he recalled of his crash from the 2020 Tour of Poland. “I stayed behind Michael Mörköv, then we they were pushing with Peter Sagan. In the last 150 meters I could have taken it. It sounds so simple, but luckily my legs held me. This is what I dreamed of, this is the biggest race,” he added.
The yellow jersey was not retained by Yves Lampaert, who experienced unpleasant moments already at the moment when he fell at the beginning of the crossing of the bridge over the Velký Belt. But he managed the situation and, with the help of Michael Mörköv, pulled back. However, the second van Aert is ahead of him in the classification in the stage, thanks to six bonus seconds.
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How did the stage go?
Go to the escape, be in it with two of the only team and end up leaving completely empty handed? This is exactly what the couple from the B&B Hotels stable “succeeded”. Cyril Barthe and Pierre Rolland formed a group of four with Magnus Cort and Sven Erik Byström, but they fell out of the breakaway during the first climbing bonus.
After a bleak chase, they both stopped and returned ignominiously to the main field. Cort and Byström, on the other hand, continued, with the former securing the jersey with the famous red dots with the mountain prizes he won. The escape trudge on a stage that ran mostly along the seashore ended moments before the raid on the big bogeyman of the day.
This was the crossing of the bridge over the Velký Belt, an eighteen-kilometer suspended structure, where the fears of crosswinds did not come true, but the falls certainly did: Rigoberto Urán had one and just a few minutes later Yves Lampaert, the leader of the race, also fell. As his QuickStep-Alpha Vinyl team looked to win with sprinter Fabio Jakobsen, Lampaert only had Michael Mörköv on hand to try to pull him back into the main pack.
This was indeed achieved, but both exhausted enough strength, which Jakobsen was to benefit from later on in the approach to the finish line, because there was no start on the bridge itself and the teams kept everything for a mass sprint. Before him, however, a good half of the peloton fell after contact between the competitors, fortunately already in the neutral zone of the last three kilometers.
Then came the spurt itself, which was dominated by Fabio Jakobsen in a close fight. The Dutchman overtook Wout van Aert and third Mads Pedersen at the line.
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