Five talking points from week one of Tour de France

The Tour de France has been a breathless, action-packed affair so far since the race set off from the Spanish Basque country. Here, AFP Sport takes a look at five of the best talking points to emerge from the first nine stages:

Yates twins duel

Britain’s Yates twins stole the show on stage one. The pair broke away late to contest a family-dominated finale. Adam, by 30 minutes the younger of the two, pulled away from his brother Simon to grab the first overall leader’s yellow jersey.

“I’ll stick it to him in a couple of days,” Simon Yates, of Australian team Alula, said after the race.

Philipsen stars

Jasper Philipsen has dominated the bunch sprints in the early stages of the race with three clear stage wins, albeit garnered with some questionable manoeuvres that kept the race comissaire busy.

Philipsen is the current leader of the green jersey sprint points rankings and looks far from finished.

But the Belgian’s Alpecin–Deceuninck team director Christoph Roodhooft told AFP he was even more proud of how much work his other superstar, Mathieu van der Poel, had done to help Philipsen.

“If we’re proud of anything it would have to be that,” he said of Van der Poel’s selfless efforts to get Philipsen in position to strike. The Dutch rider won Paris-Roubaix and the Milan-San Remo earlier this season.

Yellow jersey battle

The Tour de France was billed as a straight fight between the defending champion Jonas Vingegaard and two-time former winner Tadej Pogacar and the pair have battled out a tit-for-tat struggle so far.

Slovenian Pogacar often launches late attacks that seem to annoy Vingegaard. “The Tour won’t be won by a few seconds,” the Dane said.

Vingegaard leads by only 17 seconds after stage nine, where Pogacar clawed back a few seconds for a second time after the champion dropped his rival to gain 53 seconds on him in Laruns.

Volcano steals the show

The Basque country’s rolling hills provided an enthralling setting for the opening three stages, and the vineyards of Bordeaux and the final 3km along the banks of the Garonne on stage six also provided a breathtaking backdrop.

But the Puy de Dome volcano on stage nine was more spectacular than the race itself, where outsider Michael Woods won the day as the peloton kept their powder dry. Any predicted eruption in the overall title shake-up will now have to wait for the Alps.

Agony for Cavendish

At 38 years old, British sprinter Mark Cavendish was bidding to go one better than Eddy Merckx by establishing an all-time record of 35 stage wins at the Tour de France.

He hit the highest speed of the Tour, but was denied the record by a charging Philipsen in the seventh stage, before a broken collarbone sustained in a crash the following day put the Manx Missile in an ambulance rather than on the top step of the podium.