Given the punchy finish at Peyragudes, stage 12 of the Tour de France might have seemed like a perfect opportunity for Quick-Step Floors' Dan Martin to nab a victory, but the 30-year-old Irishman said after crossing the line that he was just happy to survive a brutal day in the saddle.
Martin hit the deck on stage 9 in the same incident that saw BMC's Richie Porte abandon the race. Remounting and limiting his losses to a little over a minute, Martin fared better than Porte – who suffered a broken collarbone – but he's still recovering from the bumps and bruises sustained in the fall. That was especially apparent on Thursday's stage, won by AG2R's Romain Bardet in a hotly contested, viciously steep finale.
"From kilometre zero I felt terrible. After 50 kilometres today I expected to lose half an hour," a visibly exhausted Martin said to media after the finish. "I'm really surprised and happy that the legs came around and the body got going. I was able to not lose too much time, even gain some. I'm very happy. I thought I could maybe win the stage but I just had nothing in my legs today."
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With six categorised climbs and a finish with gradients that neared 20 per cent, stage 12 was a test for the entire peloton.
"Everybody was running on empty, just such a brutal, brutal stage. It was so long, the weather as well, it was just exhausting. It's been a hell of a lot of kilometres in these 12 days," Martin said. "And even though it's been a lot of sprint stages, so-called 'easy', everyone was just running on empty this entire stage. For me, at the finish, you could see I wasn't myself.
"I can't really get out of the saddle properly. I can't really sprint properly. It definitely hindered me in that last 400 metres. That's why I tried to stay in good position and just rode as hard as I could all the way to the finish line – and it never seemed to arrive."
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