Even getting into a single breakaway at the Tour de France requires good legs, tactical know-how, and a fair bit of luck. To do it on back-to-back days takes all of that and some serious endurance, considering how much energy it takes to ride out front all day. Spending three straight days in the break is a pretty herculean achievement.
Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) did it for the fourth straight time on Saturday’s stage 20, and along the way, he scored enough mountain points to secure the polka dot jersey. Assuming he stays upright to finish the stage 21 time trial, he will be Ecuador’s first ever major jersey winner in the sport’s biggest race.
“This Mountain jersey is a prestigious prize,” Carapaz said after first riding into the polka dots on Friday. “All riders in my country dream of it because in Ecuador there are many mountains.”
That the former Giro d’Italia champion was actually able to outscore Tadej Pogačar in the mountains classification in a race where the Slovenian’s UAE team crushed one breakaway dream after another and set their leader up to score boatloads of points on summit finishes is truly remarkable. It has been a truly brutal Tour de France for the breakaway hopefuls, largely thanks to Pogačar’s relentless pursuit of victory.
Indeed, it was with Pogačar on his mind that Carapaz got into the break again on the Saturday’s final mountain stage. That was his best way to grab the points required to keep the jersey even in the event that Pogačar managed to make further gains at the end of stage 20 and with a Cat. 2 climb in the middle of the stage 21 time trial.
For a fourth straight day, the Olympic gold medalist gobbled up points in the early climbs, and when all was said and done on stage 20, he had secured the polka dots even despite the fact the break was caught to set up Pogačar for another stage win and more KOM points. This time, it was Soudal-QuickStep that did the lion’s share of the chasing in the bunch, although João Almeida put in a few minutes of hard work on the final climb that may have been decisive. In any case, Carapaz still managed to finish third on the stage, and with 127 total points to Pogačar’s 97.
“It was a really, really, really hard day. I had good luck to place myself well and I earned more points and I’m just really happy,” Carapaz said afterward.
“For me, it’s been a Tour that was growing little by little, day by day, and this is the best I’ve felt and it’s ended great. It’s a positive result for me. To bring this wonderful jersey home is the best.”
All told, that jersey is a fitting reward for a rider who livened up the mountain stages throughout the Tour even when the final result on those stages was the same on four separate occasions, as Pogačar triumphed atop four different summits amid five total stage wins. Clearly, Pogačar is the Tour’s “best climber,” but the yellow jersey already tells us that, as it does pretty much every year in an era where high mountains decide most of the GC picture.
In a Tour where the last few minutes of almost every mountain stage were so thoroughly dominated by one rider, fans were lucky to have the polka dots to incentivize the efforts of riders like Carapaz on all those other climbs that were not just the GC-deciding summit finishes.
That Carapaz will finish this race with a stage win and the King of the Mountains title – and also having spent a day in yellow – marks a stunning change of fortunes for the 31-year-old given where he was just a few weeks before the Tour. Carapaz crashed heavily in June at the Tour de Suisse and left the race, and then, in a double whammy of setbacks, he proceeded to get sick. To say that his Tour buildup didn’t go to plan would be an understatement.
With that in mind, he came into the 2024 Tour targeting stage wins rather than attempting to get back on the GC podium (a feat he managed in 2021), and it’s hard to imagine things having gone any better for someone in his position.
“Obviously, it was a gamble bringing him here, but ultimately you can see the level of natural talent that guy has,” team boss Jonathan Vaughters said after his stage win. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
All things considered, it’s also hard to imagine the Tour going better for EF either. After three weeks of racing where two teams carved up six sprint stages between them and three teams have a total stranglehold on the top six spots in the general classification – with the seventh best rider more than 20 minutes behind Pogačar – there was only so much left for the rest of the Tour field to fight over. Thanks to Carapaz and the teammates that helped guide him through bunch and into the breakaways, EF’s gamble turned into a haul of results that feels like nothing short of a coup.
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