Persistence

Yesterday’s winner of Stage One and the first Yellow Jersey of this Tour, Alexander Kristoff, is a model of athletic application, patience and persistence. Raising four children by dint of your pedal strokes will do that to a man. The Norwegian remains at home in Stavanger, in the southwest, with his family in the winters rather than debark to Spain or other warm climes as is the practice of so many other pros, preferring the “micro-climate there that is similar to that of Brittany or Normandy”. He’s known as a hard, consistent trainer, going out in all sorts of winter weather. One can imagine him riding along the coast, buffeted by the North Sea winds, with some dried Elk and lingonberries in his back pocket and a little bottle of Akevitt to get him through the cold. Very much the quiet tough guy.

 It must be said that more was expected of Kristoff over the course of his 16-year career, that sometimes a sense of disappointment can be found in the media reports on him, that he should have been more of a prolific winner of sprints. He’s one of those riders, like Italian Matteo Trentin, who is fast, but not the fastest, strong, but not the strongest. Yet, as reflects his character, he stoically endures the criticisms, waits, then grabs a glittering jewel to remind everyone just who he is and why he’s still in the game at 33. Kristoff has won two of the greatest single day races in the world, Milano-Sanremo and the Tour of Flanders, and now will wear the Yellow Jersey of the Tour de France. By anyone’s measure, just those three make a major career. He has of course many other wins, dominating the Belgians to win Gent-Wevelghem and the Three Days of De Panne, not to mention the most prestigious sprint in the world on the Champs-Élysées and a European Championship among a host of others.

 His sprint win on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice was a testament to  Kristoff’s vast experience as he had, in fact, the slowest top speed of his four main rivals. Current and former World Champions Mads Pederson and Peter Sagan hit 68.7 kph (43 mph), Cees Bol clocked in at 67.4 kph (42.1 mph), with Kristoff at 67.2 kph (42 mph). The Norwegian’s sense of timing in the headwind sprint combined with his confidence, “I felt so strong, this win could not escape me”,  not to mention deep strength – that came into play after such a torrid day of racing, more on that next - allowed him a clear, bike-length win against faster men. 

 Yesterday was, with no hyperbole, one of the most treacherous in the 117-year history of the Tour de France. It hadn’t rained in the south for months allowing a buildup of combustion engine waste on the road, especially those from diesel fuels, a technology still widely used in Europe. When rain hits in those conditions, the oils rise to the surface and suddenly the roads become as slippery as ice. It was pure carnage with over 100 riders hitting the deck at one time or another. I’ve been in those conditions; you sit a still as you can on your bicycle, literally afraid to bat an eyelash, while the entire peloton, shoulder to shoulder as one-unit drifts from one side of the road to the other and back. It’s a terrifying experience and an exhausting one as your nerves are on the screaming edge the entire time and there’s no rhyme nor reason as to who crashes and who stays up. The massive pileup just inside of the three-kilometer to go mark, the one that took down French hope Thibault Pino, “one of the worst days of my career”, was a result of pure rider fatigue.

 What’s more, the roads themselves were, in my view, unsuited to the first road stage of the Tour de France, the most nervous stage of all when everyone is fresh and excited. Tiny, twisting mountain roads with knee-high stone walls are acceptable when the race is settled in, not at the debut. You can look over those little  walls into the ravines and see burned out cars that, obviously, didn’t make the turn, cars that no one has ever retrieved. It should be noted that Grace Kelly, the movie star turned Princess of Monaco died driving those roads. 

 The riders finally took matters into their own hands – again, I applaud the athletes for acting as a collective – and called their own Yellow Flag until the mountains were finished and the Mediterranean rejoined, lifting the caution so that the sprinters could go back to work over the final flat 15-kilometers of the race. Still, much damage had been done. Former World Champion Philippe Gilbert is out with a broken kneecap, John Degenkolb didn’t make the time limit and Rafael Valls is out with broken femur. 

 Disc brakes took a bit hit on the day too, with many riders changing to rim before the start through fears of premature wheel lockup, and of course, the tragicomedy spectacle of Julian Alaphilippe’s front wheel change. Alaphillipe was standing by the side of the road for what seemed an eternity, before his team car finally pulled up and the mechanic jumped out with the electric drill that is needed to undo the disc wheel. Unfortunately for France’s greatest racing star, the drill was unable to loosen the stuck wheel and after a period of confusion, they pulled his spare bike off the roof and sent him on his unhappy way, far, far behind the race. I did see another, incident-free change, as perfect as one can be, and with the disc it still took :25. And while we’re at it, what is going on with the Alaphilippe’s tires? Six flats at Strade Binanche, one at Milano-Sanremo and now this one at the Tour. Cycling media is reporting – although it’s clear to me that there is tremendous pressure on those sites to shill for tubeless and disc, so much so that they’ve lost all credibility for me – that Deceunick-Quickstep is using either tubeless or clinchers in the races. Not working out so well methinks.

 We’ll learn much but not all today about the condition of the protagonists for Yellow. Two first category mountains are on the menu, the first time in over 40-years that mountains have featured so early in a Tour. As my observant friend Wade put it, perplexed about the design: “It’s as though they took the Midi-Libre and combined with the Dauphinè, calling it the Tour.” 

This is certainly a Tour like no other, and despite my sniping, I’m so very happy it is happening, a ray of sunshine through the dark clouds of these days.