Tour de France Stage 9 ANALYSIS: How Tim Merlier eclipsed Jonathan Milan at the line in Châteauroux

Tim Merlier (Soudal-QuickStep) denied Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek) a weekend sprint double at the Tour de France, coming from behind the Italian to score his own second win of the race on stage 9 to Châteauroux.

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Something we don’t see very often are the big sprinters without any leadup trains, but we saw that today. I’m going to run you through exactly what happened in this bunch. It was quite a chaotic one, but not for Tamilia. First of all, we’ve got the two FDJ riders followed by Jonathan Milan here. Then you’ve got two picnic riders just here on the left hand side and two of the riders from Israel Premier Tech. I want to highlight Tim who’s down here who won the stage. Jonathan Milan who I’ve already highlighted and then Arno Delete just sitting here. If you keep an eye on how this goes into the sprint, it’s relatively straightforward. So, Tima on the right hand side following Danny Van Popler at the minute, one of the best leadout riders. But at this point here, this is where it all starts to change. Those two lines coming together. The cuffish rider here getting caught in a little bit of a bubble and having to put the brakes on. Jonathan Milan finding his way onto Aceman’s wheel and Tima still on the right hand side with space at the minute behind Danny Van Pppel. As the sprint carries on into Timia still has room on the right hand side until this point here. Akaman goes on the right and now Jonathan Milan who we can see moves up onto the right hand side. Danny Van Poppy is going to move off this way to give Milan that clear runs the line but this is quite early to do so. So at this point you’ve got Akaman here, Tim Malia here and then you got Pavl Bitner on the right hand side who is just coming up from behind. So Bitner moves up on the right hand side here. And it’s at this point you can just see the cheeky little elbow starting to come out from Timia to push on that side. Tim realizing that if he follows Milan he might run into trouble from Bitner on the right hand side. So he he has to start going on the left hand side. He has to back off to do this. Takes a breath backs off the wheel soft pedals but when he starts to go he kicks off the wheel of Aan and then it’s a drag race to the line for Malia and Milan. Following Malia is eventual third place rider Arnold Deu surfed the wheels to get in there onto the wheel of Tim Millia. As I said we don’t really see many sprints nowadays without one lead out train succeeding but this looked to just to be every man for himself and the king of the chaos once again got his arms in the air Timia just an outstanding rider in these situations but that finish couldn’t have gone any smoother for him in his situation. Amazing win.