Remco Evenepoel and Jonas Vingegaard had managed to break clear together in the wind. Still, the Belgian crashed inside the final kilometre, and the Dane was swallowed up by the peloton in the closing few hundred metres.
"It was pretty crazy. I hope he's okay, because it looked really crazy, and you don't hope that for anyone. That's not the way I want to win. That's also why I waited in the peloton. I shouldn't use it as an advantage for me. Then I would have rather sprinted against him", said Vingegaard to TV 2 Sport after the race.
"I think I could have driven home from there (and won, ed.). I don't think it's dignified when he goes down like this. I don't know how it happened. Suddenly, he just went over the handlebars, and it looked really crazy."
His team checked Evenepoel, but he was able to remount to cross the finish line and seemed to have escaped serious injury.
Strangely, Evenepoel and Vingegaard escaped in crosswinds with just under 30km to go on what was otherwise a flat stage as Vingegaard reacted when Evenepoel attacked. They built up a gap of 25 seconds at times, which was narrowed down to below 10 inside the final 5km. Inside the final kilometre, the pair were still in front when the roundabout crash occurred.
"I didn't expect it like this, I expected it more to be a bigger group," Vingegaard said, according to Cycling Weekly. "He went, I jumped across to him, and he was very strong on the flat, he's very aero obviously. Very strong at the moment. I'm happy I could jump across and work a bit with him."
Asked about the cooperation between the pair, the Dane added: "At some points he wasn't really happy with me, but that's how it is, it's cycling, we have our tactics."
As Vingeegaard after the crash held back, Dorian Godon (Ineos Grenadiers) took his second stage win of the race, sprinting to victory ahead of Ethan Vernon (NSN Cycling) and Noah Hobbs (EF Education-EasyPost).
