Stage 4: Dax to Nogaro, 181.8km
Philipsen Doubles up in Nogaro
Nogaro, Tuesday, July 4th –Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) took his second win of the 2023 Tour de France, and his fourth Tour de France sprint finish in a row, in a finale littered with crashes.
From the start in Dax —home town of the legendary sprinter André Darrigade, who won 22 Tour de France stages— to the finish on the Circuit Paul-Armagnac race track in Nogaro, everything pointed to a sprinter taking the spoils in stage 4, sandwiched between three gruelling stages in the Basque Country and the race’s first foray into the Pyrenees. The super-speedsters did not let this golden opportunity go to waste. Barrelling down the flat roads of the Landes and Gers departments, the sprinters’ teams kept a tight rein on a stage in which the breakaway took its sweet time to form.
The Norman duo of Benoît Cosnefroy and Anthony Delaplace took off with 86 kilometres to go and added some excitement to the race before getting reeled in about half an hour before the finish. The European champion, Fabio Jakobsen, was among those who hit the tarmac in the crash-marred finale, leaving Jasper Philipsen to surge to his fourth Tour de France bunch sprint win on a trot, one day after raising his arms in triumph in Bayonne and a year after coming out on top in Carcassonne and on the Champs-Élysées. It was a double whammy for the Belgian rider, who cemented his status as the king of sprints and wrested the green jersey from Victor Lafay, while Adam Yates stayed in yellow.
Stage 4 Results and GC