When the dust settles on today’s Willunga Hill showdown at the Santos Tour Down Under, we’ll see that Jhonatan Narváez (UAE Team Emirates) won the stage and now leads the race overall. That’s fitting – he’s proven to be the strongest overall rider in the race, and will probably take home the trophy as a result.
Result aside, today’s stage 5 was a day that offered plenty in the way of surprises. Or in the words of former pro turned TV commentator Robbie McEwen, as the riders began the second and final ascent of Willunga Hill: “Every normal tactic has been thrown out today.”
First there was an unplanned, two-man team time trial from the Jayco AlUla pair of Chris Harper and Mauro Schmid. Just as the day’s breakaway was caught, at the bottom of the first Willunga ascent with 24 km to go, Harper rolled off the front and dashed away up the climb. Michał Kwiatkowski (Ineos Grenadiers) tried to follow, but in the end only the Swiss champion Schmid set off in proper pursuit, leaving the home team with two up the road.
It was a curious tactic and one that did take the pressure off GC leader Plapp back in the bunch, but it certainly wasn’t planned.
“Chris was supposed to stay till the last climb, but he was racing off instinct, and we need to allow that,” Jayco AlUla sports director Mat Hayman said later. “He felt like he needed to go. He’s the ultimate teammate, and he knew it needed to be hard if Plappy had a chance to win the tour. And he took it upon himself to make it hard, and he sacrificed his own GC there.”
The next head-scratching moment came on the flatlands on approach to the second and final ascent of Willunga. With Harper and Schmid still holding a narrow advantage, Plapp was doing as he’s wont to do, sitting right at the back of the peloton.
So when his former team Ineos Grenadiers exploited some crosswinds with 7 km to go, ultimately splitting a small group off the front of the bunch, Plapp was caught out and missed the move.
“To be honest, I just didn’t expect that to happen on the lead-in to the climb,” Plapp told Escape. “I was just trying to keep cool. I was trying to recover and just compose myself. I didn’t want to burn any matches I didn’t need to before the climb. I was trying to save it for a massive six-minute effort up the climb, because I knew I was going to be so attacking.
“Credit to Ineos for taking it on and creating some chaos. But I was lucky. I was always on the wheels and actually didn’t do any extra work to get back. It’s not like I got caught out, and I was the one having to do the effort.”
Sure enough, the front group – which had just caught Harper and Schmid – was reeled in just as the final climb began, reshuffling the deck ahead of the final GC showdown of this year’s Tour Down Under.
And then came the most surprising move of them all; a wonderfully entertaining and audacious attack from the overall leader himself, Javier Romo (Movistar). With almost the entirety of the Willunga climb still in front of him, the Spanish former triathlete opted to defend his overall lead with aggression.
“Massive set of cojones,” was how Plapp described Romo’s daring attack. “To be honest, I thought that was absolute suicide. I was like, he’s either gonna ride away, and this is gonna be one of the most impressive Willungas we’ve ever seen, or he’s gonna lose the bike race.
“And to be fair, for him to sit in and be there at the end, chapeau to him. He rode like a pretty big champion out there, and took the race by the scruff of the neck.”
Narváez had a similar impression.
“Oh, he’s a really strong guy – chapeau,” he said, shaking his head. “When he attacked in the bottom, I say maybe he’s gonna die later. But, you know, he showed how strong is him, because then he was [fifth]. So really strong guy.”
Despite his earlier exertions, it was Harper who followed Romo, trying to reel in the ochre jersey for Plapp. And then Plapp himself attacked, with 1.9 km still to go, setting off in search of Romo.
That move appeared to be the cause of some tension at the Jayco AlUla campervan post stage. A frustrated Harper was heard raising his voice at Plapp, telling his young teammate that it should have been Harper doing the chasing. Hayman agreed that Plapp probably could have waited a little longer.
“Maybe he attacked a bit early,” Hayman said. “There’s the corner that Richie [Porte, six-time Willunga winner] goes on and there’s a reason that Richie goes there. It’s the hardest part.
“He’s keen to impress, he’s keen to go and maybe he went a bit early, but I can’t fault him for wanting to race. I can’t fault him for going after the win. And that’s all we ask. And every one of the riders stepped up today, and we didn’t pull it off. That’s bike racing.”
Plapp’s move did thin the group down to just a select few, with Narváez and last year’s Willunga winner Oscar Onley (Picnic PostNL) able to hold the wheel. They caught Romo with 800 metres to go at which point Plapp surged again. In fact, after making his initial move, Plapp got almost no help from any of the others.
“I don’t blame Narváez for the way he rode – he’s the fastest there, and he’s got the sprint probably,” Plapp said. “I would have expected Onley and the likes of those boys to maybe ride for a bit more time considering how close the race was behind, but I gave it everything I had.
“I mean, I’m never going to beat those guys in a bonus sprint. I either get away and win solo … or it was better off trying to get as big a break as I can.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the work he’d done, Plapp faded a little as Narváez opened his sprint. The Ecuadorian won the stage with relative ease ahead of Onley, while Finn Fisher-Black (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) came from behind late to take third on the stage. Plapp was fourth with Romo holding on for fifth.
While that result sees Romo drop from the overall lead down to second, the Spaniard doesn’t seem to have any regrets.
“I know that my sprint is not so good, but I tried to attack when the second group was behind because I thought it’s possible that Narváez is not in a good position,” Romo said, referencing the earlier split in the crosswinds. Like Plapp, Narváez had been dropped in the crosswinds.
“I tried – it’s possible that it was [too] early,” Romo said. “I lost the GC but I’m very happy to be second.”
For Narváez, today’s success comes after what was a frustrating end to stage 4, 24 hours earlier. Had things played out differently, he might have won that stage as well, and taken the lead then.
“Yesterday was really a bad feeling because I didn’t sprint,” he said of getting boxed in against the barriers in Victor Harbor. “[Bryan] Coquard closed me in the last corner, and it was really frustrating.”
The 27-year-old is anything but frustrated this evening. With one stage remaining, he now leads the Tour Down Under by nine seconds ahead of Romo, with Fisher-Black a further three seconds down in third.
Tomorrow’s final stage is a flat, 90 km circuit race around Adelaide which will almost certainly finish in a bunch sprint. As a result, it seems most likely that Narváez will go out the overall winner of the race. He’s the strongest sprinter among the would-be GC challengers, so taking time from him – in bonus seconds at the finish or in intermediate sprints – is highly unlikely.
If he does win, he’ll be a thoroughly deserved winner. After finishing third on Willunga and second overall last year, Narváez has taken a step up in his first race with UAE Team Emirates. He won the reduced-bunch sprint for second on stage 3, behind Romo – the first GC day – he was third in a reduced-bunch sprint into Victor Harbor despite not being able to do his best sprint, and today he won on Willunga. That’s the sort of impressive all-round performance that is required to do well at the season’s first WorldTour race.
Narváez himself will start the final stage feeling confident that nine seconds is enough.
“In this race I think it’s a lot,” he said, “and we will try to manage it.”
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