Richard Carapaz, the current Olympic road race champion, won stage 17 of the Tour de France, in Superdévoluy, after catching and dropping the British rider Simon Yates on the day’s toughest climb, the Col du Noyer.

The Ecuadorian, who wore the yellow jersey for a day in the first week of the Tour, caught Yates, of the Jayco-AlUla team, 15km from the finish, after dropping the Welsh rider Stephen Williams further down the slopes and then attacking once again.

Related: Tour de France 2024 – Richard Carapaz wins stage 17 as race returns to the Alps – live

Carapaz, of the EF Education-EasyPost team, has not been selected by his national federation to defend his Olympic title, yet has consistently been among the most attacking riders in the 2024 Tour. Winner of the Giro d’Italia in 2019, and third to Tadej Pogacar in the 2021 Tour, he has now won stages in all three of Europe’s Grand Tours.

“I have won stages in the Giro and the Vuelta, but the Tour is the race with all the best riders in the world,” Carapaz said. “It is the best race.”

Behind the battle for the stage win, a surprise attack from the race leader Pogacar, of the UAE Emirates team, which he described as a “stupid instinct”, had little real impact, but ultimately worked in favour of the third‑placed Remco Evenepoel, of Soudal Quick-Step, who stole back a handful of seconds on a faltering Jonas Vingegaard in the closing moments.

But as the second‑placed Vingegaard ceded time to both the yellow jersey and Evenepoel, Pogacar rescinded the comments he had made on Tuesday evening in Nîmes, when he was asked if he had ever used carbon monoxide rebreathing, a legal technique, to evaluate the benefits of altitude training.

In Nîmes, when asked if he was familiar with the technique and if he had used it, he said: “I don’t know what it is. I was thinking it’s what goes out from the exhausts from the car, so maybe I’m just uneducated.”

However, 24 hours later Pogacar’s memory seemed sharper. “Yesterday, I didn’t quite understand the question,” he said. “The team said to see how you respond to altitude, you need to do this test. It’s like a two- or three‑minute lung test. Then you see the haemoglobin mass and you need to repeat it, two weeks after.

“I did the first part of the test, but the second part I never did. It’s not like you’re breathing exhaust pipes in a car. It’s just a simple test to see how you respond to altitude training.”

A slow-burn stage that was expected to lead to an explosive finale took some in the peloton by surprise. Even before the triptych of climbs in the last 30km, riders were quitting the Tour, with the sprinters Sam Bennett, of the Israel-Premier Tech team, and Fernando Gaviria, of Movistar, plus Alexey Lutsenko, teammate to Mark Cavendish at the Astana Qazaqstan, among those to leave the race.

Biniam Girmay, however, the Eritrean leading the points jersey classification, who had crashed on the stage finish into Nimes, showed few ill effects and the Intermarché-Wanty rider increased his lead over Jasper Philipsen, of Alpecin-Deceuninck, in the fight for the green jersey.