After a day of chaos, Jasper Philipsen restores order

It is clear that the organisers of the Tour de France have been taking lessons in inclusivity. And they have applied themselves well. The seventeenth stage of the 2026 Tour de France, the 174.7-kilometre Chambéry–Voiron leg, was a perfect example of a ‘cycling fluid’ stage. It didn’t discriminate against anyone; it gave all types of cyclists on the course – sprinters, rouleurs, breakaway specialists and climbers – the chance to win, because there was a fair bit of climbing at the start, a constant series of ups and downs over the final hundred kilometres, and a few short, steep climbs in the closing stages.

Inclusivity in cycling causes chaos. For 110 kilometres, there were those breaking away from the peloton, those trying to break away from those breaking away from the peloton, those waiting for the chasers to catch up before setting off again, and those who didn’t understand where they were or what was happening and, caught up in the general commotion, tried to break away themselves. There were those breaking away to attack and those breaking away to defend themselves against those who might attack them.

And amidst this general upheaval and the abandonment – at least in part – of logic, at a certain point those who usually set themselves up as defenders of order – the sprinters and their domestiques – began to create chaos; they started breaking away to experience what it feels like to be chased rather than to do the chasing. After all, if you’re surrounded by rascals, you have to be a bigger rascal than they are.

And the road leading to Voiron has always been teeming with rogues, people who would loiter there on the lookout for stagecoaches and merchants coming down from the Val d’Isère or heading up towards it. Cycling has the ability to draw out the true spirit of any place, even its hidden essence. It has succeeded in doing so once again.

For whilst it is true that the road leading to Voiron was full of rogues, it is also true that at a certain point they were no longer welcome; the local people stopped protecting them and almost all of them ended up in the local jails. Looms and silkworms had arrived. And with them came trade; with trade came money; and so those who got in the way of trade began to be sidelined in favour of order.

Mads Pedersen tried to cause a stir throughout the stage, whilst Jasper Stuyven spent around ten kilometres alone at the front of the peloton, savouring a solitude that, for a few dozen minutes, he had believed might last right to the finish.

The sprinters, who had experienced what it feels like to be chased rather than doing the chasing, remembered, however, that they win races by biding their time in the final metres. And so they applied a touch of logic on a day when reason was conspicuously absent.

Jasper Philipsen relied on Mathieu van der Poel, and the Dutch champion skilfully stepped in to restore order to the chaos. And so the ‘inclusivity’ stage ended in a sprint finish involving just a handful of riders, though very few of them were actually in with a chance of winning. It always ends up like this with inclusivity. Never mind, we had a good time. Jasper Philipsen won the seventeenth stage of the 2026 Tour de France and was surprised to have managed it, given that up to that point everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong for him.