After one of the toughest starts to the Tour de France in recent memory, Fabio Jakobsen has abandoned the race on its 12th stage.
Jakobsen was aiming to improve on the promising fifth and seventh places in the sprints that Team dsm-firmenich PostNL took in the opening week, but the days since the rest day have been especially challenging for the Dutch sprinter. Wednesday’s stage 11 saw a fierce battle over hilly and mountainous terrain where Jakobsen fought through the stage behind the grupetto, but he was helped out by his teammates to finish within the time limit. However, in the opening kilometres of today’s stage, it became clear that Jakobsen could no longer continue and he soon stepped off the bike to abandon the Tour de France.
Team dsm-firmenich PostNL coach Matt Winston expressed: “We are disappointed for Fabio’s race to end like this. We’ve had a really promising start with full commitment from both our sprint and climbing group and we’ve been in the mix every day looking for stage results. In those opening fast finishes you could see that our sprint train was really strong, they were building more confidence with each other and things were going in the right direction. The last few days have been tough for Fabio but he gave it his all to battle on. Today as he starts to feel unwell, we can connect the dots of that trajectory. We’ll take the positives from the sprints here and with the rest of the guys we will continue to fight at the very front of the race and go for more top results as Fabio heads home to recover and reset ahead of the next goals.”
