Egan Bernal suffered another fall on stage 17 of the Tour de France and, although he returned to the lot at that time, he had to pedal very hard to avoid going over the limit.
Bernal arrived in box 124 of the stage, 37 minutes and 54 seconds behind the winner of the fraction, the Austrian Felix Gall. He crossed with his compatriot Harold Tejada and two other runners.
Regarding what happened in the fall, Egan explained to ESPN and Caracol TV: “It was nothing serious. At that moment I was going to the limit, I crowned with a difference of 100 meters and for wanting to go forward I got a little too much and I fell. It was my mistake, for wanting to be ahead and for wanting to help my teammates. There the goal was to reach the end, which was not easy at all, «he said.
Bernal recognized that the stage was very hard. In fact, the second in the general classification, the Slovenian Tadej Pogacar, fell behind the leader, Jonas Vingegaard, and lost more than five minutes with his main rival.
“I was the one who suffered the most, people pushed me a lot on the climb, otherwise I would not have arrived. The climb was very hard, I went all the way up talking with Harold and we said ‘oops, parce, we are going to reach the limit’”, said the champion of the Tour in 2019 and of the Giro d’Italia in 2021.
Egan can’t remember the last time he had to run that far to avoid falling outside the qualifying limit. «I think sometimes, not many times, plus I don’t know how to do the math, so I had to ask how long I have to get there,» he said.
In the general classification, Egan is in the 36th box, 2 hours, 20 minutes and 21 seconds behind Vingegaard, that, except for a very big inconvenience, practically sentenced the race in his favor.
This Thursday stage 18 of the Tour will take place, a 185-kilometre route between Moutiers and Bourg-en-Bresse, with two fourth-category mountain prizes.
SPORT