Will Julian Alaphilippe chase Tour GC victory? He’s not ruling it out
Will Julian Alaphilippe chase Tour GC victory? He's not ruling it out
Two-time world road champion Julian Alaphilippe (Deceninck-QuickStep) has said that he is not ruling out one day targeting the general classification at the Tour de France.
The versatile 29-year-old Frenchman always has a wide range of racing objectives on his mind, and in addition to his two world titles, his career palmares also includes a Monument win at Milan-San Remo, six Tour de France stages, three Flèche Wallonne wins, and plenty of other results in one-week and one-day races. He has finished as highly as fifth overall at the Tour, spending two weeks in the yellow jersey during the 2019 edition of the race, but he has typically downplayed his GC aspirations in the race.
While he continues to avoid any overarching pronouncement of making the yellow jersey his central focus, he told La Gazzetta dello Sport in a recent interview that he wouldn’t mind making a run at it sooner or later.
“I’m not saying no,” Alaphilippe responded when asked if he might one day target a Tour GC title.
“From now until the end of my career, why not think about it? We will talk about it with the team, there are a lot of questions to be asked. But I don’t want to get to the end of the road with the regret of not having tried it.”
That said, for now, Alaphilippe remains focused on his more traditional goals of success in one-day races and in stages of the Tour, although in his interview with La Gazzetta – owned by the same company that owns the Giro d’Italia – he did express interest in trying out the Italian Grand Tour some day.
“For 2022, I’ll be thinking about the Classics and the Tour,” he said, when asked when he would make his Giro debut. “But I want to discover [the Giro] as soon as possible.”
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