Tour de France 2020 - Who can beat Caleb Ewan? Today, nobody.

Sam Bennett had all the help he could have asked for, with a powerful set of domestiques to control things all day and a phalanx of the sport’s most revered leadout men to help him at the business end.

What he didn’t have was Caleb Ewan’s raw pace, patience or inspiration.

Much was made of the fact that Ewan’s Lotto Soudal team lost two of their best riders on Stage 1 of the Tour in Philippe Gilbert and John Degenkolb, but by approaching the sprint as a pure individualist, he freed himself from that numerical disadvantage.

Lotto Soudal domestique Jasper de Buyst did attempt to give Ewan a leadout, but the two riders had lost contact when the peloton passed underneath the flamme rouge, forcing Ewan to go it alone. The Australian then found the wheel of Bennett and clung to it until the final 400m, whereupon – rather than follow the favourite by launching his sprint immediately – he allowed a gap of a bike length to open up.

With 250m remaining, Ewan was in sixth place and looked like he was adrift, but that fraction of extra space let him plot out a course that saw him lurch from the centre of the road, to the rightmost extreme, within a hair’s breadth of the barriers, where he picked up a few microseconds of Bennett’s slipstream.

By the time Ewan had finished his effort he was to the left of the centre of the road again and a wheel in front, despite a noticeable line deviation from Bennett. He rode faster but also smarter, processing all that information in a few fractions of a second. Which is to say nothing of the incredible risk he took in going the long way around Peter Sagan and coming so perilously close to the barrier.

Giacomo Nizzolo (NTT Pro Cycling) was the in-form sprinter coming into the Tour, but what was clear today is that – career-best performances in the Italian National Championships and European Championships notwithstanding – he simply lacks the raw speed to beat a rider like Ewan. Nizzolo had – arguably – a clearer run to the line in Sisteron than either Bennett or Ewan, but found himself drifting in for third.

Cees Bol’s Team Sunweb will be wondering what else they can possibly do to get him a win, after arriving into the final straight with three riders to help the young Dutchman – two more than any other team. Once the third of them had pulled off, Bol simply couldn’t sustain the effort and appeared as though he had dropped anchor, slipping back from the front to seventh in the closing few metres.

Peter Sagan never really looked like winning today, but he’s become so good at capturing the green jersey with a mixture of top ten sprint finishes and hoovering up intermediate points from the breakaway it seems unlikely he’ll lose any sleep over his fifth place. In fact, by passing Kristoff today on the points standings and yesterday’s day out in the escape, the stage seems set already for yet another uncontested campaign for the maillot vert.

Ewan’s performance was redolent of Mark Cavendish at his freelancing best and proved that – in Grand Tour sprinting at least – being outnumbered doesn’t necessarily mean you’re outgunned.