Welcome to JB Squared. I'm JB Hager along with Johan Berniel, and we're going to look at stage 17 of the 2023 Tour de France where

things just exploded today if you haven't watched. I know a lot of you actually listen to the show and you haven't watched the race

which still fascinates me and we appreciate you doing that. But Johan will have some insight into

maybe what's going on with today, Pogachar, right? Because it was it was a rough day if you haven't seen it. We'll get into all of that and

talk about the stage winner on the Queen stage. That's all coming up on JB Squared. All right, let's start out. Johan talking about Felix Gal. This is a name that is just come on strong

this season. He's still a young rider, 25 years old, and winning the Queen stage, like a big, big win and a win for

AG2R French team. We talked about Felix Gal week or two ago. He's not been hiding for two weeks and then

he's been hiding for two weeks. So I would love your thoughts on this guy. Yeah, amazing, amazing win. As you say, JB, you know, this stage

to be able to win this stage even from a breakaway, everybody knew that this was going to be a big challenge because that last climb

called a La Lose is so hard, 28 kilometers and the last seven, eight kilometers are super steep at high altitude above 2000 meters. So

whatever advantage a breakaway would have within three or four minutes at the bottom of the climb was never going to be a guarantee to win the stage.

And that's what happened. Now, Felix Gal was obviously in the breakaway together with, I mean, we got to a point today in the tour.

And you often see that and especially in mountain stages that the amount of riders are in the breakaway or more than the actual main group of

favorites, the breakaway was bigger than the peloton. But you know, all, all really good riders, you know, Felix Gal, Alaphilippe, Simon Yates, Raphael Maica,

Peyo Bilbao, David Godu, Tibopino, a bunch of really strong climbers who had double intentions, you know, some of them wanted to win the stage and then some

of them wanted to try to win the stage, but also improve their overall placing, some of them wanted to get into the top 10. And then for other guys like, for example,

Peyo Bilbao wanted to improve his, his, his placing, I think he's now in sixth, still has an option to get in fifth or fourth even.

So, yeah, I mean, for Felix Gal to be in that group, he, you could see during the stage, he had, I think he had two teammates with him.

And they did an amazing job, aged to our today to keep the breakaway going. And then also at the end, to Ben O'Connor today was, you know, once, four to the two of the

last a few years ago today was the super domestic, amazing how that guy was doing the job and they knew that Felix Gal would be their guy.

Let's not forget Felix Gal, I think it's his fourth season professional. So he turned professional quite young was on, on DSM before their development team back then it was called Sunweb.

And then he was two years on that team now it's his second year on AG2R, but he only got his first professional win one month ago in the Tour of Switzerland.

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