For a stage that had been delayed until the penultimate day and built around four very difficult climbs, this was always going to be about more than just the finish on Alpe d'Huez. It became a test of who could keep producing when the race was already deep into its hardest terrain, and Sepp Kuss was the rider who answered most forcefully.
Kuss attacked on the Sarenne climb and dropped Jai Hindley, then opened daylight on Richard Carapaz in the finale of the queen stage. The American later came over the top with Carapaz 20 seconds behind, a move that briefly looked decisive until Hindley and Carapaz managed to catch him again. Even then, Kuss did not fade for long. He surged away once more in the last 3 kilometers, turning the closing stretch into a sharp contest of endurance rather than a simple sprint to the line.
A decisive move in the hardest part of the day
The significance of Kuss’s attack was not just that he gained time. It was where he did it. The Sarenne is not a place for hesitation, and the penultimate climb of the Tour’s queen stage is exactly where fatigue tends to expose whoever is merely hanging on. By dropping Hindley and forcing Carapaz to react, Kuss showed that he still had enough left to shape the stage rather than merely survive it.
That mattered because the stage was still live on two fronts. First, there was the fight for the stage win itself, with Kuss, Hindley and Carapaz all still in contention after the first decisive moves. Second, there was the broader Tour podium battle unfolding around them, with Tadej Pogacar, Del Toro, Remco Evenepoel and Paul Seixas part of the larger race picture. In that kind of setting, a late climb attack can do more than win a stage: it can alter how the final day is raced.
The numbers tell the story of a contest that kept snapping back and forth. Kuss’s gap was only 20 seconds when Carapaz came over the top, and the margin never really became comfortable. But that is also what made the move notable. He did not need a massive lead to make the point. He needed to show that he could attack, recover, and attack again on the Tour’s hardest day, and that is exactly what happened.
There is still a difference between forcing a moment and finishing it, of course. Hindley and Carapaz both showed enough resistance to drag Kuss back into range, which is a reminder that a mountain stage of this level rarely ends cleanly for one rider unless the legs are truly exceptional. But Kuss’s repeated accelerations in the last 9 kilometers, including the final push inside the last 3 kilometers, suggested a rider willing to keep pressing even when the race refused to settle.
That is what made the move so compelling: not just the attack itself, but the persistence behind it. On a day like this, the strongest rider is often the one who can make the same point twice. Kuss did that on the Sarenne, and in doing so he turned the queen stage into something bigger than a single chase. He turned it into a statement about who still had time to shape the Tour when the road was at its steepest.
