Le Tour de Insecurity

We all are living through some form of personal hell these days, but please take a moment to consider the plight of the Tour de France racers, about to take the start in Nice. It was just this morning that the French government reversed the UCI’s hard-fought changes to the race’s Covid-19 regulations, returning to the protocol of pulling any team from the Tour that registers two positives in one-week out of an entourage of 30 (riders and staff) rather than, as the UCI proposed and believed to have been accepted, two positive racers. Imagine that it’s the final week of the Tour – if it makes it that far – and French star Thibault Pinot Is in Yellow. The team bus driver and a mechanic come up positive: The Yellow Jersey is pulled from the race. Add in the fact that the tests are often contradictory, positives turn into negatives, and that the French authorities are on high alert as the virus, despite all of the draconian national measures over the past seven months, seems to be rebounding. Nice, adding to all of this, has been declared a “Red Zone”, an area of rising infection.

Athletes are often portrayed and viewed as assured paragons of confidence. In fact, they are, in the same way as actors, film directors, anyone who performs for a living, often bundles of insecurity, never knowing if they are one injury or conflict away from the end of their careers. I once asked a successful film director why he worked so much and he responded: “Because I never know if I’ll ever work again if I don’t take the job.” Lance Armstrong, despite all his bravado, was pushed by an almost crippling sense of fear. The Rock, Duane Johnson, portrayed this mental state to perfection in his HBO show, “Ballers”. 

 Look no further than Team Ineos for another example. Their Welsh star, Geraint Thomas, winner of the 2018 Tour, was second last year due to a series of freak weather and tactical events coming together in his teammate Egan Bernal’s favor. I remain unconvinced that Bernal would have won the Tour had that final 2019 mountain stage been allowed to play out to the end. Thomas, the perfect team man who’s ridden every Tour since 2013, contributing mightily to Chris Froome’s four Tour wins along the way, never uttered a word of frustration. Yet both Thomas and Froome were unceremoniously axed from this Tour, treated as yesterday’s news. That’s so cold and the reverberations have certainly been felt throughout the team – anyone can be replaced, no matter what they’ve done,  so you’d better toe the line. 

Yet within that same Ineos team lies another simmering drama. Bernal has been a bit short so far this year, unable to finish the five days of the Critèrium du Dauphinè, held only two weeks ago. A “recurring back injury” has been blamed. Behind the Colombian lurks his Ecuadorian teammate Richard Carapaz, winner of the 2019 Giro d’Italia. Carapaz, as is clear to anyone who watched the Netflix documentary, ‘The Least Expected Day’, is a cobra, ready to strike anyone and anything in his path with about the same sense of remorse as that dangerous snake.  Carapaz, with the confidence and status of a Grand Tour winner, will be racing with an eye on doing to Bernal what he did to poor Mikel Landa last year in Italy: a full-on disobedience of team orders for his own, and it must be said, ultimately successful, self-interests.

RIchard Carapaz

 Even the ‘Band of Brothers’ of Jumbo-Visma, the team finally favored to knock off Ineos this year, could have some similar issues. Primož Roglič, who has been imperial this year so far, is injured too after his high-speed crash in the Dauphinè, and the reports on his condition coming out of his camp have bordered on the schizophrenic: “He’s starting, he’s not starting, he’s fine, he’s terrible…” Behind him, in Carapaz’s respective place, sits the Dutchman on the Dutch team, Tom Dumoulin, a man also known for his seething ambition and coincidentally, like Capapaz, a Giro winner looking to move up in the world. This Tour will explode into action hitting hard mountain passes beginning already tomorrow, giving no one time to ride themselves into the race, immediately exposing any weaknesses. The dynamics between the afore mentioned quartet should prove fascinating to watch.

Tom Dumoulin

In their hearts, the riders know that every stage of the Tour could be their last and they’ll all race accordingly. Cycling, even when things are going well, is a sport that quivers on shaky financial ground. Today, only a few teams have any assurances of a secured future and as the sprinters barrel into the Red Zone of Nice today, they’ll be racing with the same fears as expressed by my film director friend: “I don’t know if I’ll ever work again.”