Just a few metres away from where EF Education-Easy Post were celebrating their summit finish stage victory in the Tour de France with Richard Carapaz on Wednesday, second-placed Simon Yates (Jayco-AIUIa) wheeled his bike wearily to a halt in front of a small cluster of reporters at the finish line at Superdévoluy.
The one subject matter to discuss was, obviously enough, his defeat by Carapaz just a few minutes before, with Yates crossing the line 37 seconds down on the Ecuadorian star. It was hard to imagine he had much appetite for talking after such a relatively narrow loss.
As is his custom, when it came to analysing what had gone wrong for him on the Col du Noyer, the crunch climb of the stage, the 31-year-old pulled no punches in his explanation.
Just before the Col du Noyer, Yates had launched a blistering move from a chase group of some 40 riders, powering through a lead breakaway alone, only to be overhauled by another counter-attacker, Carapaz. With his best chance of a stage in this year’s Tour de France going up in smoke when Carapaz disappeared ahead of him 1.7km from the top of the Noyer, Yates could not have been more straightforward when asked what had happened, saying simply, “I was running out of legs at the end".
Given the benefit of hindsight, Yates said, it had started going the wrong way before the Noyer, thanks to the fraught racing that unfolded from the gun on stage 17, with attacks and counter-moves all the way through the long, rolling buildup to the foot of the three Alpine ascents that decided the outcome of the day.
Regarding what he could have done differently in the stage, he replied, “Not waste so much energy in the start".
“I was jumping around in the start a lot like everybody but it was not an easy stage, crosswinds at first and a lot of jumping around, flat roads… it wasn’t easy for me to be there. I did my best but I was running out of legs in the end.
“Chapeau to Richie, he did a great ride so that was all I could do.”
Rather than the final 4km ascent to Superdévoluy, the much tougher Col du Noyer was where the stage was won and lost for Yates. But although he played it right strategically at that point, bridging across from the chase group, his energy levels were already running perilously low, he said.
“I followed Romain Bardet (Team dsm-firmenich-PostNL) at the bottom there. I didn’t know if he was going to launch somebody else or do something himself. But I saw I had a gap and decided to go full gas, and once I got the gap, I preferred to be alone.
“So I tried to keep [chasers] Richie and Stevie Williams [Israel-Premier Tech] away and maybe I paid for that a little bit in the end. But I didn’t really want them to catch me because you saw the end result,” he concluded.
He was twice second in the Tour last year en route to a fourth place overall - at Bilbao on stage 1 behind his brother Adam Yates and then again on the difficult Alpine stage across the demanding Col de Loze. Twelve months on, Simon Yates' GC ambitions faded completely on the ascent of the Galibier on stage 4.
This time round the Col du Noyer represented Yates' best chance yet to add a third stage win to the brace of victories he took in the Pyrenees in the 2019 Tour. But the man from Bury in north England was not overly optimistic about his chances in what remained of the 2024 Tour.
“I don’t know what the GC guys want to do in next mountain stages, if there is a chance I’ll try,” he promised. “But the legs are not giving me what I need at the minute.”
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