While I Was Away
I’ve been catching up on the sport after an away period – we’d done a family vacation which my wife termed, “The Cleanse” for which she’d confiscated our iPhones, iPads and computers, in some cases forcibly, to live a pre-2007, unconnected life, eliminating all of the cookies that have lodged into our respective brains in the process. It’s actually a wonderful thing to do. We sat around as a family and talked in an undistracted manner, while observing other families all staring at their respective phones and not speaking to one another at all.
But now I’m back to the present with all of its buzzing anxiety and nerve-jangling alerts – and so much has happened.
One must begin of course with Chris Froome’s terrible crash. I’ve had three bad ones, two on the bicycle and one skiing for a total of about two weeks in hospital. Froome’s injury list is much more than the combination of all three of mine so I shudder to think of his damage. I clearly remember the first awareness after a bad crash and the realization that something’s gone terribly wrong – you know in your soul that you’ll not walk away. A wave of deep, deep sadness washes over as you think of all your objectives, the ones you’ve worked so hard for, now crumpled like your body.
Froome had won the 2017 Tour, followed by the Vuelta, then the 2018 Giro before finally finishing second in last year’s Tour after an astounding set of performances all bundled into one, intense year. He’d taken a break, digested all of that historic effort, and was on track for the performance of a lifetime at this Tour. Froome’s comeback efforts will keep us all interested through the winter months, but, if he does make it back for the 2020 Tour, it will have been 24 months since racing a Grand Tour. The champion will be 35-years old and the world will have evolved. Either way, his attempt to return will be dramatic.
His teammate, Egan Bernal, has been the luckiest survivor of the crash-fest that’s defined the team under its new Ineos sponsor. First off, the Colombian crashed before the Giro, where he was slated to be team leader, his first command in a Grand Tour. I don’t believe that the young team they entered would have been capable of carrying him to victory, that he would have been isolated in the key moments in the same manner as Primož Roglič, and that the crash, in a perverse way, helped his career. Then, the undisputed team leader and defending Tour champion Geraint Thomas crashed out of the Tour de Suisse, the crucial, final preparation race before the Tour. Bernal, who went on to win that Tour de Suisse, on top of his Paris-Nice victory in the spring, finally showed real knockout-punch climbing speed in Switzerland and is for me the favorite for this most mountainous Tour. Of course the dynamics between the now under-raced Thomas and young Bernal – who suddenly has “co-leader” status after Thomas’s crash - will keep us all on our toes during the race, or at least until stage 6 and the first big climb up La Planche de Belles Filles where things will become clearer. One thing we can all count on is for Ineos Team Manager David Brailsford to make a phycological hash of the Thomas-Bernal co-leadership, which he’ll combine with a series of his signature, disastrous media statements.
Wout Van Aert continues to impress and the battle between him and Mathieu van der Poel for world domination continues, because you just know, Van Aert is thinking of his Dutch rival with each and every pedal stroke. Van Aert suffered under VDP’s shadow through the Spring Classics, but his team decided to give him a stage racing tryout in the Critérium du Dauphiné, the mini-Tour de France held in the Alps regions. My goodness.. After having only raced eight-times on the road this year, Van Aert won the time trial, won a sprint stage and dominated the Points Classification. Shadow no more! His team has now coaxed him in into racing the Tour de France where the classics-style stage-one in Belgium is calling his name. The combination of Van Aert and his Jumbo-Visma teammate, the Dutch sprinter – and for me the fastest man in the world - Dylan Groenewegen, will be a tough one to beat.
It’s fascinating to watch the road racing world seduction of the two “Vans”. They each race between 25 and 30 super high-intensity cyclocross’s during the Fall and Winter before jumping into the road scene. Van der Poel, who was supposed to be finished with the road until next year, has now been talked into racing the World Road Championships, and “of course he’ll need to race the Tour of Britain as preparation for the Championships….” Van Aert, for his part, suddenly has a very busy July, and one can only wonder how the two of them will manage and balance their intense fall-winters with their now equally intense spring-summers.
As everyone says, it’s going to be a wide-open Tour, always the best kind. The old lions Nibali, Thomas and Porte are having their last roars, while the new and impatient generation, the ones who been bathed in science since their teenaged years, are coming on strong. Mark Canvendish has been unceremoniously thrown to the curb, while the ageless Alejandro Valverde is ominously thin. It’s make-or-break for Nairo Quintana, the French are in with a bit of hope at least, while the Astana frighten everyone. Vive le Tour! And happy July, it’s going to be great.