Caleb Ewan (Lotto-Dstny) fought hard to beat the time cut on stage 12 of the 2023 Tour de France after a brutal day of racing, but his race came to an end during stage 13 to Grand Colombier.
The Australian was seen out the back of the peloton clutching his abdomen and shortly after, the announcement came over race radio that Ewan abandoned the Tour de France.
It was a second day of struggles for Ewan, who went out the back of the peloton during stage 12 as soon after the flag was dropped and a near 90-kilometre fight for the break began. Fortunately his Lotto Dstny teammate Jasper de Buyst was there to help him and they survived one the hardest days of the race so far.
They finished just six minutes inside the 44-minute time limit, Ewan and his lead-out man crossed the line in Belleville-en-Beaujolais arm-in-arm after their lonely battle at the back of the race. A Lotto-Dstny Twitter video showed the duo returning to the team bus, exhausted but still in the fight.
“Today sucked… but we made it,” Ewan summed up simply on Instagram while extending his thanks to De Buyst for helping get him home nearly ten minutes after the big group containing the majority of sprinters arrived.
De Buyst’s roommate at the Tour, Victory Campenaerts (Lotto-Dstny), was one of the riders fighting for the break and eventually finished 10th after experiencing the non-stop racing first-hand.
“It was incredibly hard,” Campenaerts said as he summed up the stage. “Two days ago [stage 10] was one of the hardest stages I’ve ever done and a lot of the riders agreed that it was one of the hardest stages of everybody’s career, but I think a lot of riders will agree that this one was even harder.”
The sprinters face three tough stages before the next rest day, with today’s stage finish up the Grand Colombier probably the easiest of the three tests, with a relatively easy parcours preceding the summit finish.
Stages 14 and 15 that are the most imminently threatening, both featuring five categorised climbs, over 4000m of elevation and profiles that increase exponentially in difficulty as the kilometres tick by.
Two other headline sprinters have already abandoned the 2023 Tour de France. Mark Cavendish (Astana Qazaqstan) after breaking his collarbone on stage 8 and Fabio Jakobsen (Soudal-QuickStep) who didn’t start stage 12 following a failure to recover from injuries he sustained on stage 4.
Jakobsen had beaten the time cut two days before abandoning on stage 10 in a group containing Ewan and lead-out riders from their respective teams, but neither he nor Ewan was able to properly compete in the bunch sprint on stage 11 and both finished outside the top ten at the line.
