As the Tour de France nears its end after three hard weeks of racing, tempers are short, with so many wanting something out of the last couple of days, and all exhausted. There is beef seemingly everywhere, whether in the local restaurants or between teams; watching an Uno-X car attempt to get out of the team paddock post-race, and seemingly get in the way of some Tudor Pro Cycling staff, the beef was very much at the surface.
One place there is apparently no beef, however, is in the relationship between Matteo Jorgenson of Visma-Lease a Bike and Tim Wellens of UAE Team Emirates-XRG. The pair were in the day's breakaway on stage 20, and were two of the strongest options, but in the end, marked each other out of contention. It's not the first time that Visma and UAE, the two teams going for yellow at this race, have been pushing each other at this race, or exasperated at each other either.
However, if you believe Jorgenson, the reason the pair only watched each other in the break today wasn't because they were only concentrating on stopping the other from winning, but because they couldn't do any more. Every time Jorgenson attacked, Wellens followed, and vice versa. It was comical, but apparently not because of ill will.
"I don't know about the beef, I don't think it exists," Jorgenson said. "I'm sure it makes for good headlines, but Tim and I... we just wanted to be in the break clearly today and we showed our cards quite early. Already to get in the break we used up all our bullets and we didn't have a lot left because it has been a long Tour, and we've both done a lot for our teams. In the end, we found ourselves dropped together. There was no animosity between us."
It wasn't animosity, then, which saw Jorgenson follow Wellens to his bus after the stage: "[It was] two defeated men talking, we didn't have much air to speak in the race so I just wanted to tell him that I wasn't playing games, and he also wasn't. We were just trying our best."
"Wellens and I spent our bullets pretty early, and we never recovered," Jorgenson continued. "I could tell the whole day that I didn't have the legs to win, and I could tell that Kaden [Groves] was super strong. I tried to get ahead early, I knew quite quickly that the legs were not going to come around. I think the strongest guys made it up there.
Wellens echoed Jorgenson: "Today was super hard, the beginning there were maybe 40 riders with all the favourites, and then we went away again with three riders - myself and Jorgenson and the Arkéa rider [Ewen Costiou] I don't remember the name of - and we kill ourselves a little bit to ride in front of the breakaway and then when the final began, I felt we were pretty tired.
"The problem was both me and Jorgenson were a little bit à bloc, we had the same level today but it was difficult. When Jorgenson attacked he put me totally on the limit, even if he went on the limit himself, that's his business, but I asked him to hold on and we could work together for the logs, but I don't think we had the legs to win. When Groves went for it, with a minute's advantage, that was it."
"From my side there's no beef," Jorgenson concluded. "We were racing against each other, but I don't see any beef."
Comprehensively no beef there, then. Just the small matter of Paris to come.
