Tour de France 2019: Team Ineos road captain Luke Rowe thrown out of race after incident with Tony Martin
Cameras picked up a coming together between the Welshman Rowe and his counterpart for Jumbo-Visma and both riders were disqualified from the race following the stage
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A seemingly routine day for Team Ineos ended as anything but when their road captain Luke Rowe was thrown out of the Tour de France along with the German rider Tony Martin following an incident between the pair during stage 17. Both Ineos and Martin’s team Jumbo-Visma are considering an appeal against the decision.
Rowe and Martin clashed towards the end of the 200km route from Pont du Gard to Gap, where replays showed a coming together as they jostled for position at the front of the peloton. Martin looked to cut off Rowe’s path, almost forcing him off the road, before Rowe responded with what appeared to be a punch as they rode on.
They finished the stage as part of a large main group but were quickly summoned to the race commissaires, who had been studying footage alongside Ineos’s directeur sportif Nico Portal, and were told they would not be taking any further part in the race.
“It’s the biggest sporting event in the world,” Rowe said immediately after news broke of his elimination. ”To come here with this team, a bunch of good mates, I just feel like I’ve let them down. I’ve let myself down.”
Rowe and Martin are two of the most experienced riders in the peloton, and both carry a remit of trying to command the bunch in order to put their riders in the best position on the road. The pair were also seen having strong words with each other during racing over the weekend, which Rowe dismissed at the time as nothing more than a frank conversation.
But it boiled over here, strangely so on an otherwise unremarkable day for the GC teams. “We were both trying to do a job and maybe we both overstepped the mark slightly but it feels harsh to be thrown off the race,” Rowe said. ”I think neither of us deserve that. There’s a lot people supporting you, watching you, and it’s pretty hard.”
It means Geraint Thomas, the reigning champion, will be without his right-hand man as the race heads into three crucial days in the Alps, although Rowe is not one of the stronger climbers within the team, while Steven Kruijswijk, who is third overall, will miss Martin from his team.
Speaking before Rowe had been expelled from the race, Thomas had played down the incident. “It’s the same all the time,” he said. “Luke, Tony Martin, these guys all do the same job. They always end up jostling for position. It’s nothing crazy really.”
Before then it had seemed a rare day of relief for Thomas and the rest of the GC contenders; relief from the relentless pace of this Tour as well as the intense heat when a welcome rain shower briefly cooled the peloton. The GC riders let a big breakaway go from which the Italian Matteo Trentin emerged on the final climb, jersey agape and chest hair flapping in the breeze, to clinch his first Tour stage in five years.
For Thomas in particular following his crash the day before, it had seemed perfect preparation for the three monstrous days that await in the heart of the Alps which will ultimately write the history of this Tour de France – up until the news of Rowe broke.
Without their road captain Ineos’s challenge to erode Julian Alaphilippes’s one-and-a-half-minute advantage is now that little bit harder, but there is a quiet confidence that they can break the Frenchman’s stronghold on the maillot jaune. “Obviously he wasn’t great a couple of days ago,” Thomas said of Alaphilippe’s struggles in the Pyrenees. “He’s been racing really well but you think he’d be starting to get tired, so teams will be trying to make it hard. It will be interesting. It’s three big, big days. A lot can happen.”
The party line at Ineos remains that Thomas and his co-leader Egan Bernal are both free to chase their own goals, even if one sacrificing themselves for the other might serve as their best chance of winning this race. Afterwards the 22-year-old Bernal repeated his line that “Gee is our first leader”.
“We finally arrive in the Alps and I’m fifth, Gee is second,” said Bernal, “so I think we are in a good position. I will be spontaneous [tomorrow]. I don’t know too much about the course, I know the climbs but not too much. It’s a big day for me for sure, but I’m really happy with this Tour and if I don’t do a good Tour tomorrow I will still be happy, because I arrived with three to go in fifth.”
While it was relatively quiet in the main bunch beyond Rowe’s battle with Martin, it was chaotic at the front. This stage was always likely to benefit the breakaway and there was an almighty scrap to be part of the select few. In the end it was more than a few, as 33 riders escaped down the road and quickly built an unassailable lead from the yellow-jersey bunch.
Greg van Avermaet and Thomas De Gendt were two of the biggest threats, the latter having won a similar stage brilliantly on day eight, but they got caught on the wrong side of a divide in the latter stages and faded away. From there the European champion Trentin took over, surging away up the Col de Sentinelle and racing down the other side into Gap alone to win by half a minute from Quick-Step’s Danish rider Kasper Asgreen.
“It was an emotional finish because I’ve only won two races in my whole career alone,” said Trentin. “It was amazing to ride away from such a strong group, probably no one would have put a euro on that this morning. I tried a few times, because there was no collaboration, and I knew with the legs I have I could finish it off.”
The result caps a stunning Tour de France for his Australian team Mitchelton-Scott, clinching their fourth stage win after victories for South Africa’s Daryl Impey and Britain’s Simon Yates, twice. That haul matches Dutch team Jumbo-Visma, which along with Deceuninck Quick-Step have wrung every last drop out of this race so far.
Of the handful of teams at the top of the general classification, only Ineos are yet to win a stage. That could all change in the coming days but it might not have to; where other riders have enjoyed good days and suffered bad ones, Thomas and Bernal have been the picture of consistency, and there is hope within the team that if they hold their nerve in the blistering Alpine sunshine, the rest may melt away.
France’s darling Thibaut Pinot will attack in the mountains, the Dutch Jumbo-Visma rider Steven Kruijswijk has a strong support group, while the young German Emanuel Buchmann is still in the mix and is something of an unknown quantity. This race remains impossible to predict, and with three brutal stages to come, that in itself is something to be cherished. One of the most enthralling Tours in years is all set for its finale in the Alps.
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