2017 UCI WorldTour winner Greg Van Avermaet (BMC Racing Team) continues to lead the Tour de France as cycling’s biggest stage race reached its first rest day. Despite a fraught first week of bunch sprints, cobbled stages and punchy uphill finishes, Van Avermaet has maintained a tightly held grip on overall since BMC Racing Team won the team time trial on stage three. Van Avermaet could not win the Tour’s most difficult stage of the first week, stage nine to Roubaix over the much-feared farmland cobbles of northern France. But thanks to a late breakaway, his second place behind another former Paris-Roubaix winner, John Degenkolb (Trek-Segafredo) has enabled the Belgian to extend his lead to 43 seconds over Geraint Thomas (Team Sky). Top overall favourite, four times winner Chris Froome (Team Sky), is currently in eighth place at 1.42. The Tour’s points classification is currently commanded by the 2012-2016 winner of the classification, reigning UCI World Champion and current UCI WorldTour leader Peter Sagan (BORA-hansgrohe), whilst Tom Skujins (Trek-Segafredo) heads the King of the Mountains rankings. BMC Racing Team had have had a 2018 Tour de France of mixed fortunes after their Australian stage racing star Richie Porte crashed out of the race for a second successive year on stage nine. The 2018 Tour de Suisse winner was lying tenth overall. Other top favourites affected by bad crashes this year, but still in the race, include Dan Martin (UAE Team Emirates) and Rigoberto Uran (EF- Education First p/b Cannondale), second overall in 2018.
Tour de France > Saturday July 7th - Sunday July 29th
So far, the high points of Australian Damien Howson’s career have mainly been in time trialling - but that may well be about to change. The 25-year-old from Adelaide hit the headlines in 2013 when he won the U-23 World Time Trial title, the same year ‘Damo’, as he is nicknamed, took the U-23 Australian National title. But since turning pro for Orica-GreenEdge (now Mitchelton-Scott) in 2014, Howson has turned in one solid performance after another in Grand Tours as a team worker. Howson completed his first Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España in 2015, then finished the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España in 2016 as well as the Tour de France in 2017 and is currently racing his second Tour de France. Howson has also shone on home soil, with his one UCI-classified win to date in one of Australia’s longest-standing stage races, the Herald Sun Tour in 2017.
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