Tour de France 2022

Stage 4 – Dunkerque > Calais (171.5km)

Profile

Tour de France 2022 Stage 4 Profile

Stage 3 Result

1st Dylan Groenewegen (7/1)

2nd Wout van Aert (11/2)

3rd Jasper Philipsen (9/1)

Stage 3 Bets

1pt win Caleb Ewan @8/1

No luck again for Ewan – he looked to have the speed to win but got squeezed against the barrier in the final 50m. Surely things will fall for him before the Tour is out. The sprinters look to be very evenly matched which is making for very exciting, if sketchy, finishes. To France!

Here’s how the final played out.

Stage 4 Preview

After a fantastic Grand Départ in Denmark with some truly amazing crowds, the race restarts in the north of France for a stage between the port cities of Dunkirk and Calais via some hillier terrain a bit more inland. There are no less than six fourth-category climbs on the route with the final one only 10km from home.

In the final we have a tricky 90-degree left-hander with 500m to go making good positioning vital (when is it not?) before a flat run to the line. This should end in a sprint, but will those hills blunt the finishing kicks of the fast men enough to give others an opening?

Stage 4 Contenders

This really is in the balance between what we might call ‘pure’ sprinters and the more versatile ‘classics’ sprinters. They’ll likely all be there at the end but how will the quickest finishers cope with the climbing metres beforehand? The two sprints we’ve seen have been very close affairs – there really isn’t much between the front six or seven sprinters. For some the gaps have opened at the right time, for others not.

If we’re looking for riders that can produce a fast sprint after a hilly day out, then Wout van Aert is of course top of the list. He’s the fastest of the non-pure sprinters and it’s no surprise to see him favourite at a best price of 7/2 to win stage 4. Amazingly, he’s finished second in all three stages so far but has just failed to get his nose in front. Van Aert has been perfectly positioned in both sprints by Christophe Laporte – a repeat here and he’s likely to go very close.

Despite how much it’s rightly praised, the QuickStep-Alpha Vinyl train hasn’t been faultless on the opening sprint stages. On stage 2 Fabio Jakobsen was without his final leadout man, Michael Mørkøv, for the crucial last 500m. The Dane had used up energy to tow Yves Lampaert back to the bunch following his tumble on the bridge and by the final kilometre had run out of puff. Then on stage 3, the usually excellent Mørkøv didn’t check whether Jakobsen was on his wheel and affectively just led out Laporte and Van Aert.

They’ll no doubt nail a finish perfectly before long, but they’ll be worried about this one. Even though it’s less than a kilometre long, that final rise close to home with an average gradient of 7.5% could put Jakobsen in trouble. They’ll look to give him sliding room at the bottom and then nurse him over it. They’ll then have 5km or so to get back to the front of the race. Not impossible, but it won’t be straightforward and that puts me off Jakobsen, especially at the short odds on offer.

Jasper Philipsen wasn’t ideally positioned for the sprint on stage 3 forcing him to launch very early yet he still almost got up. There’s no doubt that Philipsen has what it takes to win a stage here at the Tour de France and make up for all his near misses. This lumpier terrain is no worry to him, and he should again have the full support of his Alpecin-Deceuninck team.

Can Jasper Philipsen land his first Tour de France stage win? (Image: Shutterstock Standard Licence)

Lotto Soudal’s Caleb Ewan has been luckless all year. The five-time Tour de France stage winner was sick ahead of Milan-Sanremo – one of his big season objectives – and then had his “Giro from hell”, as he said, earlier this year. His cobbled-together leadout has actually done a pretty good job and he’s been in a position to win on both sprint stages so far. But he hasn’t been able to launch a full sprint – getting squeezed and suffering a mechanical on stage 2, then getting blocked against the barrier when his legs were fully loaded on stage 3.

Surely his luck must turn, and it could be here. The short climbs won’t worry him at all and may of course get rid of some of his rivals. He’s available at 8/1 which again is tempting.

The most likely to fall off the back on that final climb is stage 3 winner Dylan Groenewegen. This lumpier profile is not ideal for someone with his bigger build, and it may be his teammate Michael Matthews that ends up contesting the final. Considering the emotional turmoil he’s been through it was good to see Groenewegen get his win but I can’t fancy him for this, even at the best price of 11/1 on offer.

This looks like an excellent stage for Trek-Segafredo’s Mads Pedersen. After his third place on stage 2, he was well positioned inside the last 500m on stage 3 but just didn’t appear to have any zip left in his legs to challenge for the win. There was a slight coming together with Philipsen but otherwise his run was pretty clean. I wonder if he’s a little drained having failed to achieve his big goal of either winning a stage or wearing the yellow jersey in his home country. Still, there’s 16/1 in places on Pedersen which looks too big.

There’s 16/1 also available on Peter Sagan who is competing at something like his old level which is great to see. You can never write off the three-time world champion who, let’s face it, looked a shadow of his former self all season until landing a stage win at the Tour de Suisse out of the blue.

Ordinarily this stage would also look a good fit for Mathieu van der Poel, but I think it’s best to stay off him for two reasons. One, I expect him to again work for Philipsen, and two, he’s sure to have one eye on the cobbles on stage 5 if not the hilly stages that follow as his best chance of leapfrogging into the yellow jersey.

Van Aert is the most likely winner but I prefer the prices on Ewan and Philipsen – so again it’s a toss-up between the two. This terrain offers him the best chance of a win so far and Philipsen is the pick at 13/2. But I fear the little Aussie!