Buitrago finishes Tour de France in 10th on GC

While Team BAHRAIN VICTORIOUS may have missed out on winning a stage at the 111th Tour de France, it still scored a lot of top10 results. And young Colombian rider Santiago Buitrago finished the race in 10th on GC.

Nine stages and a first restday into this year's Tour de France the ambitions of Team BAHRAIN VICTORIOUS had not changed: the team was still trying to win a stage and to get one of its riders into the top10 in the overall standings. After a relatively uneventful day stage 10 came down to a bunch sprint with Phil Bauhaus crossing the finish line in 8th. But throughout the following two days the team lost two of its riders as first Fred Wright missed out on the time limit before Pello Bilbao was forced off his MERIDA bike and to abandon the race the next day due to exhaustion. Bilbao had lost a lot of time the day before already and thus was not an option for the general classification anymore.

Santiago Buitrago on the other hand managed to stay with the best climbers deep into the finale of mountain stages both in the Pyrenees and in the Alps - with Pogacar, Vingegaard end Evenepoel riding a race in their own league. Buitrago followed up a 6th place at the Pla d'Adet mountaintop finish with a 7th place atop the Plateau de Beille, thus moving up into the top10 on GC. The only Team BAHRAIN VICTORIOUS riders to score better results in the stages were the two German sprinters: At the end of stage 16 Phil Bauhaus was only beaten by Jasper Philipsen in Nîmes, and Nikias Arndt had finished stage 13 in 5th place.

But as the third week wore on Santiago Buitrago seemed to lose hold on the 10th place on GC. The challenge came from a number of riders who gained a lot of time by making it into breakaways on one hand. On the other hand Buitrago's fuel tank seemed to go empty as the Grand Finale in Nice got closer. The Colombian could not keep up with his main rivals on the two last mountaintop finishes at Isola2000 and Col de la Couillole, having to settle for 14th in both stages and dropping out of the top10 by a very small margin. But thanks to a strong performance in the hard conclusive ITT leading from Monaco to Nice that was rewarded with a 9th place on the day, Santiago Buitrago still managed to get hold of that 10th place on GC in the end. 

111TH TOUR DE FRANCE, STAGE 16: GRUISSAN - NÎMES, 188.6KM
1. Jasper Philipsen, BEL, in 4:11.27 hours
2. Phil Bauhaus, GER/TEAM BAHRAIN VICTORIOUS, st
3. Alexander Kristoff, NOR, st

Photos: Sprint Cycling Agency