"Nice!! Huang!!"
Almost the instant Huang Chong took third place, Aldag's ghostly shriek came through the radio.
In the Tour de France, any top-ten stage finish was immensely valuable.
At the same time, even the slightest advantage was a huge victory for a general classification rider.
Huang Chong crossed the line third. Although he was in the same group as the peloton behind him and held no substantive lead, the top three on the stage received time bonuses!!
That meant he was the first rider among this Tour's very top GC contenders to gain an advantage.
But Huang Chong himself remained clear-headed.
This tiny advantage was nowhere near enough to keep him smiling for long.
And he knew perfectly well that his success today had entirely been because Wout van Aert was in the peloton. The other teams had simply not wanted to cooperate in the chase.
They had kept letting Visma–Lease a Bike set the pace, but Jorgenson alone could never match the two riders up ahead taking turns at the front.
Otherwise, when those two had only a thirty-five-second advantage with four or five kilometers remaining, they would have been swallowed by the peloton long ago.
The facts proved that every team in the peloton had judged the situation correctly.
If Huang Chong had not dropped Jorgenson in the bend with one kilometer remaining, using his far superior cornering ability to open a gap from the peloton, then Wout van Aert would truly have won in the end!
"Holy shit, that was incredible!! It's a shame he couldn't catch Bardet in the end, but Huang Chong chose the perfect moment to overtake in that final corner. He completely shook off the peloton!!"
"I have to say, Huang Chong's cornering was fucking extreme. If it were me, I'd have