TDF 2020, Stage 1: Nice—Nice, 156km
An elder statesman winds back the clock in Nice
DENVER, CO — Vive le Tour. Has there ever been or shall there ever be a year where that cry shall be more invoked? Such a highly anticipated Grand Depart this was in Nice. In March and April all seemed lost, surely the Tour would be cancelled. The world was indefinitely locked down. There were no gatherings. Many could not work. There were no sports to distract or entertain us. In late Spring and early Summer, the lockdowns came to an end, city by city, state by state, nation by nation. Yet the well of entertainment provided by Netflix, cable, and YouTube were starting to run dry by then, and the return of sports was still far off. Finally, at the beginning of August, sports returned and it seemed brighter days were ahead. But the summer has not been a smooth gradual recovery for many countries and regions of the world. And in recent weeks, COVID cases in France have been rising. Luke Rowe (Ineos Grenadiers) on his podcast released on the eve of the Tour said at its peak in the Spring France was having 8,000 cases per day, but now they are back at 6,000 cases per day. Geraint Thomas (Ineos Grenadiers), his cohost, pointed out though that at that point the hospitals were getting overrun, and they were not able to do nearly as much testing in those frightful early days. Solid reasoning by Thomas, surely things are better now. And yet, all are uneasy, yes, all are uneasy. Will the Tour be hampered? Will teams be booted in twisted homages to the Festina or Puerto scandals? Will the Tour limp into Paris? Could it possibly not even make it? Yes, when we say “Vive le Tour” let us truly mean it, truly wish it, and may those on the ground in France do everything in their power to make it true this very year.And yet here we are now. The riders’ preparation from the past few months is completed. The COVID tests have been passed. Everyone has signed in. Temperatures have been taken. The ribbon cutting has taken place. The riders’ masks have been discarded. The neutral section has been ridden. Masked Christian Prudhomme, Race Director, has stuck his head out of the sunroof of the red commissaire’s car, he has waved the white flag and the 107th Tour de France has begun.
As this epic begins, let us do what is done at the beginning of every epic. Let us invoke the Muses. At this time, I call upon St. Francis de Sales, for he is the patron saint of writers and journalists. His earthly mission mostly took place in Geneva: not far from Nice, a few mountain ranges and a border crossing away. St. Francis de Sales, I ask you to pray that my words hold the dear Readers’ attention. Pray that my words do such a glorious and prestigious race justice: may they fittingly describe the ecstasy of victory, the agony of defeat, the nerves of the chaotic days, the monotony of the transitions, the moments that warm our hearts and the ones that break them. Pray that when the day is done and the notes are taken I always have or find the inspiration to craft a compelling narrative…not for my own glory, but as a worthy tribute to the past and present heroes of cycling and thus further promoting the most romantic sport in all the world. I look to the great ones on such topics of epic and journalism, for cycling is their intersection: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tolkien; Buzzati, McDougall, Mura, Abt. Surely they are untouchable, yet I shall emulate them nonetheless in my own little way. With that said, let us see begin the first chapter of this year’s epic. For us fans it feels like Christmas morning, but for the riders it feels like D-Day.
D-Day turned out to be more accurate it seems. Today was beyond the classic nervous opening day of the Tour as the peloton weaved its way around the mountainous valleys of Nice. The narrow roads, the unexpected pinch points, the traffic furniture were surely all there as usual, but there was another uninvited guest that crashed the party: heavy rain. If ever there was a day it should have stayed away, it was this day. Dear Readers, certainly rain is not uncommon, even the dreaded wet descending is undeniably part of the sport; but it is in the riders’ rights to groan whenever it falls in the grand tours and especially on the first day of the Tour de France. Ah, the first week of the Tour. I shall say the cliché maxim once now, get it out of the way, not to be used the rest of the Tour: here was a day you could not win the Tour, but you could certainly lose it. There is not a day more nervous than the first day of the Tour: especially when it is a flat sprint. The sprinters wake up with butterflies in their stomachs: “We come to it. Only a few times in a career is it possible for a sprinter like me. Could this be the day I wear the Yellow Jersey?” Those sprinters’ Directeur Sportifs are just as wound up all day, the blood pressure is higher than usual: “We need our riders to stay safe, but this is the biggest opportunity of the year to reward the sponsors for their investments…we need results.” They sit in their cars behind, trying as best they can to maximize control over things that cannot be controlled. They bark orders into the radios of their riders: “Guys, move up,” “Be in the first 20 places into this turn,” “Careful, the road narrows across this bridge.” This leads to a stressful day for the teammates of the sprinters, but also the teammates protecting a GC rider. Thus, more than half the teams fight for the front, the safest position to be, causing crashes that were already inevitable…and this all makes the rest of the field that were not yet nervous stressed out as well. Now, throw into the mix a deluge seeming to be dispatched by Thor himself, and the stress and nerves of the first day of the Tour reach maximal levels.
Yes, yes, perhaps, dear Readers, Thor, the god of Thunder, really did command the clouds this day. Perhaps he had vested interests? Such mighty rains are common in the northern races: Belgium, the Netherlands, Brittany and Normandy, anywhere in Britain. Even in March here in Nice, the weeklong stage race Paris-Nice, the “Race to the Sun,” has not always lived up to its name. Yet this Stage 1, this Grand Depart, was originally slated to take place in late June when the beautiful Cote d’Azur sunshine could be counted on to bask the riders’ already tanned limbs; O! how they would have glistened! And until this very day, Nice had been baking in the sun for months without a drop of rainfall. Yes, dear Readers, I am now convinced: the god of Thunder surely travelled down to watch such a day of racing. Perhaps he came mainly for a beach holiday because the beaches would not be as crowded this year with the pandemic restricting travel. But when he looked at the riders lined up this morning, perhaps something came over him, perhaps a mischievous relative had been rubbing off on him lately. Did Thor think to himself: “I have come far out of the North to see this fabled Tour de France. I was told the mountain stages are the most exciting, but here they are in mountainous Nice and they are only going over a couple small lumps this day. How entertaining would it be—if I intervened—to see these cyclists’ stress levels cranked up to eleven?”
In all my years of watching cycling, this is up there for most stressful days I have ever seen. Some of the northern classics: Omloop, Gent-Wevelgem, Flanders, Roubaix have had worse weather to be sure, but there it is expected. If you have a bad day you pack it in and you try again tomorrow. Here, everyone is counting on you to make it through today and the next day and the days after that: your job only starts today, what a deficit your team would be at if you had to pull the plug on the first of twenty-one stages…not to mention how gutted you would feel to drop out of the biggest race on the calendar before it even got going. So stressful and dangerous were the conditions this day that the riders were slipping on the roads while going uphill! The descents and the city boulevards were even more hair-raising. We saw Pavel Sivakov (INEOS Grenadiers) bleeding on both elbows. Julian Alaphilippe (Deceuninck – Quick Step) had a scare. Miguel Angel “Superman” Lopez (Astana) skidded across the length of the road into a traffic sign for increasing the pace on the descent ever so slightly. George Bennett (Jumbo-Visma) and the rest of his team upon catching the breakaway with 58km to go actually successfully instituted a neutralization of any racing until the major climbing and descending was completed. There has not been any “Le Patron” of the peloton for well over a decade, such a full-stop neutralization like this had probably not been seen at the Tour since the days Bernard Hinault, the Badger, that larger than life character. They crawled down the descents like snails. And though successful, ironically, George Bennett still slipped and crashed. Such havoc we could accept from Loki, but from you, Thor? Why? Was this all only for your amusement or are there ulterior motives?
The peloton came down off the last descent, back onto the wide straight roads into Nice. A sigh of relief came over all; their hearts were lightened. Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers) consulted his lieutenants at his ease. Greg Van Avermaet (CCC) was laughing at a fellow’s joke. Rigoberto Uran (EF) discarded his rain cape. They all cruised down the straight highway into Nice, parallel to them ran a monorail train, for a few minutes those passengers had the best possible view of the Tour de France. A few more kilometers of truce passed until Benoit Cosnefroy (AG2R) attacked to snap the race back into life. The peloton became strung out, the usual suspects emerged to control the front. With 20km to go, Quickstep, NTT, and Bora all gave chase to Cosnefroy: for stage favorites were in their ranks of course. In the final kilometers, Jumbo and Quickstep were on the front, behind them lurked Ineos, Bora, and UAE; the jockeying for position was so engaging no one, not even his own mother, noticed the catch of Cosnefroy. It had been announced to the teams that GC times would be taken with 3 km to go due to the adverse conditions, but alas! literally beneath the 3 km banner there was a crash. It seems everyone was alright, but many lost a fair bit of skin and lycra including Thibaut Pinot (Groupama-FDJ).
Then we came to it at last: the sprint at the end of a draining, wet, and highly stressful day. In such conditions were the best sprinters ready to contend? Who still fancied their chances? Under the “Red Flame” signifying 1km to go, Peter Sagan (Bora-hansgrohe) was placed well with a teammate driving the pace. Wout Van Aert (Jumbo-Visma) was moving up with a lead-out man. Sam Bennett and his Quickstep teammates were surging up the side. Trek-Segafredo were also coming on strong for the reigning World Champion, Mads Pederson, in his Rainbow Jersey. But then as the meters were counting down, I recount my thoughts in that moment: “Who’s this coming around the surging lead-out men? Surely on the other side of the road, Bennett and Sagan do not have the momentum to draw even with him. O! the World Champion is on his wheel, but I do not think he has enough time to come around him either. Why, he’s done it! Well, well, I am surprised, I did not think he still had one of those sprints in him.”
Surely, I should not have been surprised. Such a cold, wet, and hard day; yes dear Readers, such days as these are where Alexander Kristoff (UAE), the Norwegian, thrives. Remember the wins he notched in the 2014 Tour, they were marvelous. And cast back your memory to the Spring of 2015, for that stretch where he was on unparalleled and unreal form. When he won six races in only nine days, the big catch of the lot: The Ronde van Vlaanderen (“Tour of Flanders”). Yes, on that cold and wet Easter Sunday in Belgium five years ago he showed shades of Hercules: he made every split, countered every attack, broke away himself; there was no way he could be denied victory that day. In the harsh Northern conditions the Norwegian has always been in his element, why was I surprised by this hardest of hard men today? Because his hey-day is over, I thought long over. Not since 2018 had Kristoff won a Tour stage, and though that one was on the hallowed Champs-Elysees, the crown jewel of sprints, by that point in the race the top four or five fastest sprinters in the world had already been eliminated from the race. Yes, even Kristoff himself would admit, his best years are well behind him. He has already turned thirty-three, who knew he still had the speed to compete with the Ewans and Bennetts of the world. But today he did, in such conditions it should have been a no-brainer that he was a threat and he should not have been so easily dismissed…yes, Thor, now your plans are laid bare. You came down here not for a beach day, but to help a descendant of the people who worshiped you in the pagan days of old. You know Kristoff’s racing Ragnarok, his Twilight, soon approaches and you intervened to give him the opportunity of a swansong victory. Not just another bunch-sprint Tour victory, but also the coveted maillot jaune, the Yellow Jersey, for the first time he dons it; what a capstone for his career. You have heard the rumblings of the youngsters shaking the foundations of the cycling world, but out of a soft spot for this Man of the North you gave him the conditions upon which he strives so that, if he had the strength, he could roll back the clock and hold off the youngsters one last time at least. And he did have the strength. Well played, Thunder god. A brutal stage, with a fitting winner.
Cycling Odysseys 