Marijn van den Berg has made his mark in the fight for a spot in the Tour selection of his team EF Education-EasyPost on Thursday. The Dutchman won a mass sprint in La Route d’Occitanie, a small stage race in France.
The 25-year-old Van den Berg started the sprint about 250 meters from the finish in Carmaux and convincingly beat his competitors. He stayed a bike length ahead of the Frenchmen Dorian Godon and Sandy Dujardin, who finished second and third respectively.
For Van den Berg, the stage win comes at a good time. The rider from De Meern does not yet know whether he will be allowed to participate in the biggest cycling race in the world, more than two weeks before the start of the Tour de France.
EF Education-EasyPost informed Van den Berg at the beginning of this year that a decision would be made about his Tour participation at the end of this month. The sprinter made his Tour debut last year. He finished the tour and finished fifth once in a sprint stage.
Richard Carapaz, Harry Sweeny, Neilson Powless and Ben Healy already seem certain of a place in the Tour selection of EF Education-EasyPost, which is led by the American former rider Jonathan Vaughters. The Tour starts on Saturday, July 5 in Lille.
Onley wins in Switzerland
In the Tour of Switzerland there was also Dutch success. The British Oscar Onley of the Dutch team Team Picnic PostNL won the queen stage after a duel with João Almeida on the final climb. For the 22-year-old Onley it was his second professional victory.
Despite missing out on the stage win, Almeida did good business in the standings. The Portuguese, who has to help his leader Tadej Pogacar to the overall victory in the Tour, was driven to a few minutes behind in the opening stage on Sunday, but he has already made up a large part of it.
Almeida is now only 39 seconds behind the new leader Kévin Vauquelin. Bart Lemmen was still third in the standings on Tuesday, but came in eleven minutes after Onley on Thursday and has fallen far behind.
The second stage of the Tour of Belgium was a prey for Jasper Philipsen. The Belgian from Alpecin-Deceuninck, the team of Mathieu van der Poel, was the best in a mass sprint. With that he took revenge: on Wednesday he had almost fallen in the opening stage. The Colombian Juan Sebastián Molano of UAE Team Emirates is the new leader in the standings.