Cycling: Team Sky dominate 11th stage of Tour de France

The second Alpine stage of the 2018 Tour de France took place on Wednesday and Team Sky have proven their superiority by doing a double at the arrival and also taking the yellow jersey. Geraint Thomas won the stage for Team Sky, Chris Froome finished second, and Thomas also secured the yellow jersey that had previously been held by Team BMC's Greg Van Avermaet. The Team Sky duo also managed to inflict a delay of over a minute to rivals Nairo Quintana, Vincenzo Nibali and Romain Bardet, while other general classification contenders had even greater delays at the end of the stage. Stage 11 was an unusually short one, just over 100 kilometers, but it featured two special-category climb and a first-category ascent right at the end. Team Sky took control of the bunch, as they usually do, keeping the breakaway close enough. Alejandro Valverde was the first of the big names to attack on the penultimate climb of the day, then Tom Dumoulin followed but the duo never managed to gain more than 30 seconds on the main bunch. Then Alejandro Valverde was unable to follow Dumoulin and got dropped by the main bunch as well on the final ascent of the day. Michal Kwiatkowski was the last team-mate left with Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome with around 6 kilometers left, and when the Polish rider finished his work it was Thomas that attacked, causing major cracks in the main bunch. Quintana, Nibali and Bardet were unable to follow, while Chris Froome managed to catch up with his team-mate shortly before the finish line. Tom Dumoulin was caught and dropped while Mikel Nieve, who was in the breakaway all day, lost his lead of the race with just 350 meters left in the stage as Geraint Thomas passed him at double speed. Thomas is now leading the general classification, with team-mate Chris Froome in second place with a delay of 1 minute and 25 seconds. Tom Dumoulin is third, 19 seconds behind Froome, while Nibali is fourth, 2 minutes and 14 seconds behind Thomas. Chris Froome is now 4/7 at Bet365 to win the 2018 Tour de France, while Geraint Thomas is 5/2.