Veteran Valverde shows old class to win Dauphine sixth stage as Lutsenko takes lead

Le Sappey-en-Chartreuse: Evergreen Alejandro Valverde produced a trademark late dash to win stage six of the Criterium du Dauphine on Friday as Alexey Lutsenko finally got hold of the overall lead.

The 41-year-old Movistar leader Valverde has built a career on the kind of finishing that saw him overhaul Tao Geoghegan Hart just before the line on a steep ascent to Sappey-en-Chartreuse after 167.5 kilometres.

It was a second win of the season for the 2018 world champion who has been planning to go out with a bang at the Tokyo Olympics ever since its route was revealed.

“A win is always special,” said Valverde, who now has 132 career wins. “When I saw the line i just went for it.”

Briton Geoghegan Hart, who won the 2020 Giro d’Italia, had made a burst with around 300 metres to go but couldn’t hold on until the finish, but his team leader Geraint Thomas climbed up the overall rankings to fourth at 13 seconds.

Astana rider Lutsenko has been loitering with intent to seize the yellow jersey for several days but had been foiled so far by plucky Lukas Postlberger, who raced his last day in yellow today after taking the lead on stage two.

“The yellow jersey was my objective for the day, but now in the mountains Ion is better suited,” Lutsenko said.

Going into the decisive final two mountain stages Lutsenko is eight seconds ahead of his teammate Ion Izagirre, with Bora-Hansgrohe’s Wilco Kelderman a further four seconds back in third.

But the gaps are such that any rider in the top 20 is still in with a chance of taking the overall title on Sunday, a title which generally bodes well for the Tour de France.

Saturday’s penultimate stage is a 171.1km run between Saint-Martin-le-Vinoux and the ski resort La Plagne, which finishes with a 17.1km climb at 7.5 percent towards a summit climax at 2,072 meters above sea level, the highest point of the week.

Colombian Egan Bernal is isolating with mild symptoms after contracting Covid-19, less than a week after he won the three-week Giro d’Italia Cycling race, his personal communications team said on Friday.

Also a winner of the Tour de France Bernal and his girlfriend Maria Fernanda Gutierrez took a coronavirus test before traveling home to Colombia from Monaco “and have just been informed of the test results in which both are infected with the virus,” the cyclist’s press team said in a statement.

A source from the Colombian Cycling Federation confirmed the authenticity of the statement.

The 24-year-old remains ‘in quarantine in Monaco’ and neither he nor Gutierrez have shown any signs of ‘complications,’ the statement said.

Bernal stormed to Giro victory in May after dominating the first two weeks of the race, before holding off spirited resistence from Briton Simon Yates and Italy’s Damiano Caruso in the final few days.

He stormed onto the scene in 2019 by winning the Tour de France, Cycling’s most prestigious race, even beating his Ineos Grenadiers teammate and reigning champion Geraint Thomas into second.

In doing so he became the first Latin American to win the race and at 22 was the youngest champion since 1909.

Turkmenistan event canceled: Meanwhile, the track cycling world championships have been pulled out of Turkmenistan because of the coronavirus pandemic, the International Cycling Union said.

The UCI said in a statement that the championships “have been canceled in their initial format, at the request of their organizers, as the health constraints and restrictions linked to the COVID-19 pandemic make it impossible to stage the event in the country.”

The championships had been set for Oct. 13-17, more than two months after the track Cycling competitions at the Tokyo Olympics.

The UCI said it was in talks with “several” potential hosts to replace the Central Asian nation.

Turkmenistan’s authoritarian president, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, often promotes Cycling and other sports. He received an award from the UCI last year.

Agence France-Presse