Kooij fastest in Pau on a day the Tour let the sprinters have
Olav Kooij won stage 5 of the Tour de France in Pau, coming off the wheels in a full-gallop bunch sprint to beat Max Kanter and Tim Merlier at the end of 158.3 km from Lannemezan. Look at the names behind him. Merlier third, Jasper Philipsen fifth, Biniam Girmay sixth, Mads Pedersen seventh, Milan Fretin and Søren Wærenskjold filling out the ten. Every fast man in this race was there, on the same finishing straight, at the same time. And Kooij beat the lot of them.
That is the whole story of the stage, because the road offered no other. The profile claimed 1,395 metres of climbing, which sounds like something until you find where it hides: the only rise the route notes bothered to mark was the Côte de Baleix, 1.3 km at well under one per cent, topping out at 347 metres with 25 km still to run. That is not a climb, it’s a slight change of mood. Nobody got up the road for any distance worth recording, and the sprinters’ teams kept the day on a leash from Lannemezan to the outskirts of Pau. Kooij’s winning average of 45.42 km/h tells you the leash was short.
There’s an honesty to a stage like this. No pretending, no doomed escape narrative, just 158 km of positioning and then thirty seconds of violence.
The violence went Decathlon CMA CGM’s way. Kooij took the win and the 10-second bonus; Kanter, second for XDS Astana, took 6; Merlier, third, took 4. Kanter’s day is worth a line of its own: the German jumped 42 places in the points classification, from anonymity to third overall on 77 points. Kooij enters the green jersey top five for the first time, in fifth on 70. But nobody is catching Mads Pedersen yet. The Dane sat up with seventh place and still leads the points competition on 143, sixty-four clear of Girmay. That’s not a lead, it’s a moat.
The general classification did not move. Not one rider in the top eight changed position, which is what a stage like this is for. Torstein Træen keeps the overall lead for Uno-X, with Sean Quinn at 28 seconds and Mathias Vacek at 3:50. Then comes the gap that defines this Tour so far: Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard sit together at 7:53, Remco Evenepoel at 8:16, Juan Ayuso at 8:17.
Read that again. The four riders everyone expected to contest this race owe a Uno-X domestique-turned-leader the better part of eight minutes, and after five stages none of them has taken a second of it back. Træen won’t hold yellow to Paris; the maths of a grand tour rarely forgives a 28-second buffer over Quinn, let alone whatever the big four do when the road finally goes uphill properly. But every flat day like this one is a day banked for the man in yellow, and the contenders’ arithmetic gets uglier each evening they let it sit.
Which brings us to Lidl-Trek, quietly the best-placed team in this race. Pedersen owns the points lead. Vacek is third overall and wears the white jersey, 4:16 up on Ramses Debruyne and 4:30 on Ayuso, his own new team-mate. And the team classification? Lidl-Trek lead that too, by 19:26 over Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe. Three jerseys’ worth of leverage, two of them likely to last. Somewhere a directeur sportif is sleeping very well.
The mountains competition stayed frozen at the top, Alex Baudin’s 13 points untroubled by a stage whose signature “climb” averaged 0.71 per cent. Fair enough.
No power numbers from this one, and none needed. A stage decided in a 200-metre drag race is about timing and nerve, not sustained wattage, and Kooij’s timing was better than Merlier’s and Philipsen’s on a day both wanted it. That should worry them. The Dutchman’s team has him delivered and confident, and the sprint hierarchy of this Tour looks a lot less settled than it did a week ago.
The GC men, meanwhile, got a rest day in all but name. They won’t get many more. Eight minutes is a lot of road, and someone has to start riding it back.