Unpredictable elements crucial to rekindling of Tour de France romance | Richard Williams

The most meaningful touch of the 2019 Tour de France was not the slap Luke Rowe gave Tony Martin after the German had tried to run him into the gutter, leading to the expulsion of both riders from the race. It was the touch of hands between Julian Alaphilippe and Egan Bernal as they rode in the peloton towards Paris, a salute from the man who had brought the race to life to the one who was about to take the spoils: a moment summing up a race that, over the course of three weeks, had rekindled old enthusiasms and enraptured new audiences.

What, someone had asked me as I sat glued to the TV one afternoon in the middle week of the race, do you see in this? I tried to explain how a three-week Grand Tour resembles cricket in its prolonged complexity but with one big difference: imagine a five-day Test, a 50-over one-day match and a Twenty20 game being played simultaneously, with all the different priorities, internal rhythms and contrasting techniques superimposed on each other. And, again as with cricket, the elements play a vital role in ways that are often hard to predict.

Certainly no one had envisaged the storm that cut short last Friday’s stage to Tignes, in which all the narrative strands had been set to explode at once. But, having begun with one set of tears as a torn thigh muscle forced the great French hope Thibaut Pinot to abandon the race in distress, it ended with another as Bernal tried to hide his face from the TV camera after removing the yellow jersey from the shoulders of Alaphilippe, France’s other darling.

The hailstones and the mudslide that halted the race after the riders had crested the giant Col d’Iseran led many to express their disappointment that the promised showdown had been distorted by circumstances outside the riders’ control but really this was just the Tour being the Tour: the riders are pitting themselves against the elements – mountains formed by volcanic eruptions millions of years ago and the weather systems of a large country – and sometimes the elements answer back.

As this year’s highest point, the Iseran was dedicated to Henri Desgrange, the founder of the race, who saw his creation as an ordeal from which only the strongest would emerge. How would he have reacted? Probably by expecting the riders to wade through the flood and clamber over the mudslide before setting off on the final climb. No such option was available to Christian Prudhomme, his current successor, as the riders raced down towards a series of potentially lethal hazards under the eyes of the worldwide TV audience. If Bernal was the beneficiary, then it was a reward for seizing the initiative in the Iseran’s final kilometres.

Colombia’s Egan Bernal (right) passes the Arc de Triomphe during the 21st and final stage of the Tour de France.



Colombia’s Egan Bernal (right) passes the Arc de Triomphe during the 21st and final stage of the Tour de France. Photograph: Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA

Two days later, as the 155 survivors rode up the Champs Élysées into a golden sunset, the former pro David Millar watched from his TV commentary position and mused on the arrival of a new generation. “You feel like something’s happening,” he said. But he wasn’t just welcoming the youngest champion since François Faber in 1909. He meant the feeling that this Tour had been characterised by an approach based on risk-taking and inventiveness, a philosophy embodied by the flair and volonté of Alaphilippe, who had worn the leader’s jersey for 14 days and engaged the affections of spectators around the world before weakening and dropping to fifth place during the final two days in the Alps.

Down at the finish line, Dave Brailsford was stamping on any such suggestion. As he basked in a second consecutive one-two finish for riders under his command, the Team Ineos chief expressed a sincere admiration of Alaphilippe and Pinot, who between them had raised hopes of a long-awaited home victory. But his verdict was unequivocal. In the end, he said, “strategy paid out over chaos, and teamwork paid out over individuals”.

While some may prefer chaos, Bernal’s personality made the outcome acceptable even to those who had dreaded yet another crushing demonstration of Brailsford-inspired teamwork. Who could not fail to warm to a young Colombian who arrived in Europe only three years ago but was able to make his podium speech in Paris, without notes, in English, Italian and French as well as his native Spanish, and with such evident modesty?

Two days earlier, having just assumed the race leadership, he had been asked about the pressure of wearing the yellow jersey on behalf of a whole cycling-mad nation. “It’s strange,” he said, “because I don’t feel pressure. I really love to ride the bike. I enjoy the race. I enjoy to be fighting with these guys, the adrenaline, you know – to wait, wait, wait, then attack and go full gas. For some it’s a lot of suffering but I love it. It’s not a space for pressure.”

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The sight of a proper flyweight climber winning the Tour de France – in the tradition of Charly Gaul and Marco Pantani – was a rare treat, while the race’s complexity made room for great individual feats by the breakaway specialist Thomas De Gendt, the sprinter Caleb Ewan and two other climbers, Simon Yates and Vincenzo Nibali, the latter the 2014 winner whose victory in the final mountain stage revealed another facet of the race: that three weeks is long enough to ride yourself out of a spell of poor form and to regain self-respect.

Whether this was or was not the best Tour de France in history, or whether a great denouement was ruined by the weather, is beside the point. In all of sport, there is no human spectacle like it. And this was the most gloriously human Tour of all.

source: theguardian.com