The Australian team were content to let Jasper Philipsen's Alpecin-Deceuninck and Caleb Ewan's Lotto Soudal do the work on the front to keep the group of Mads Pedersen, Quinn Simmons (both Trek-Segafredo), Filippo Ganna (INEOS Grenadiers), Stefan Kung (Groupama-FDJ), Mateo Jorgenson (Movistar), Fred Wright (Bahrain Victorious) and Hugo Houle (Israel-Premier Tech) in check with many riders having tired legs after brutal mountain stages.
And the stage progressed as planned for the sprinters teams through the first 100 or so kilometres as the break were kept at around two minutes and the peloton mostly stayed together despite crosswinds occasionally splitting the race.
That was until the Lotto train got mixed up going around a corner with 71 kilometres to go which saw Ewan crash and his teammates who had been pacing stop to help, the peloton slowing down as a result.
For BikeExchange-Jayco, that may have been the moment to take up the chase for Groenewegen, but over 20 kilometres of racing went by until the Alpecin-Deceuninck riders ran out of steam and major GC teams INEOS Grenadiers, Jumbo-Visma and UAE Team Emirates began to slow the bunch to protect their leaders and give the break more time.
Once the Australian team finally got on the front of the bunch, the break's gap had gone from two minutes to three and a half minutes with 43 kilometres to go and no other teams were willing to work with them to try and chase them down.
They got going they got the gap back down to two and a half minutes pretty quickly, but made little progress after that eventually calling off the pursuit with 17 kilometres remaining, and Pedersen took stage honours from a reduced breakaway at the finish.
Team riders Michael Matthews and Nick Schultz had similar perspectives of how the stage played out after the finish, revealing the plan was to wait and see how things would progress.
"That climb where we started chasing, it could've gone two ways - we could have drilled it at the start of the climb and had it not go in our favour, so we had to gamble a bit and see how the race evolved," Schultz told SBS.
"We had a go, but it's not always successful."
"Dylan got through the climbs with us quite well, and then we tried to gamble and bring it back but they were just too strong at the front," Matthews said.
"There's not so many opportunities in this Tour de France."
The Tour de France continues with Stage 14, a hilly stage with a brutally steep short climb into Mende to finish. Watch on the SBS SKODA Tour Tracker from 7.55pm AEST with the SBS and SBS On Demand broadcast starting from 8.30pm AEST.
