A Wild Day at the Races

A Wild Day at the Races Sunday’s Stage 15 was nuts. The race exploded out of the gate, a ripping 28-kilometers covered in the first half hour (35-mph), the insane pace continuing with the initial 100-kilometers raced in just two-hours. Then the hard part began. Lot’s happened in that opening two-hours, Bob Jungels (Deceuninck-Quickstep) took Sergio Higuita out with a cycling version of a perfect judo foot sweep, leaving EF1’s team leader Rigoberto Uran short a crucial man for the mountains. Peter Sagan’s assault on Sam Bennett’s Green Jersey has lost steam, illustrated by the way Bennett and his pilotfish Michael Mørkøv handled Sagan with ease at the only special points sprint of the day, and while a break did escape, the steamrolling Jumbo-Visma’s kept them on a short leash, headed by der Panzerwagon Tony Martin, the German reveling in his role as “Dream Crusher” in chief. The Dutch squad stayed on the front of the peloton for the entire day, up the two Category 1 climbs that preceded what many were terming the hardest of the entire Tour, the 17.4-kilometer, Grand Colombier. Talk about drama, the Colombier gave it to us in bucketloads. Of course the big news was the total, absolute collapse of defending Tour champion Egan Bernal, who lost 7’20” on the finishing climb, limping to the top surrounded by his Ineos guard of Michal Kwiatkowski and Jonathon Castroviejo. The rest of the team had long been scattered across the French countryside in this historic implosion of a franchise. I’ve always been less than convinced of Bernal’s status as the Second Coming, finding him too diesel-like for the explosively of modern cycling. When in Colombia this March, we (Ravi and Thad) all saw his same, somewhat anemic attempts at attacking that we’d just seen in the Pyrenees. Two days ago I wrote of being somewhat disturbed by what I felt were his overly dramatic, playing-to the-camera, emotional distress on top of the Puy Mary. Bernal’s failure was long-coming, all the signs were there to foretell it. Bernal has always been enveloped in a protective, familial atmosphere, whether at home in Colombia or in European base in Piemonte where his adopted Italian family looks after him with loving care. His long-time companion, Ximoy Guerrero, a Colombian national team mountain bike racer in her own right, has been the rock in his life, keeping him focused on the tasks at hand in a cycling atmosphere. The news that the two have broken up, that he has a new love - which is almost clichè, the man who makes it to the top then leaves behind those who got him there - cannot have been good for his focus. He can do whatever he wishes of course, matters of the heart are what they are and no one has the right to judge, but this change in his life, the need to now establish new patterns where there was rhythmic certainly before, are disruptive in so many ways. We are seeing the results of that disruption here in the Tour. Team Ineos too are foundering, much due to the tragic loss of their beloved French Director Nicola Portal, who suddenly passed away in March. Portal, it turns out, was the glue that held the franchise together. Both Sean Yates - the great Sean Yates in my book, the man who brought the United Kingdom their first-ever Tour de France victory - and the winner of that 2012 Tour, Sir Bradley Wiggins, have finally broken their silence and come out with knives drawn against the team leadership. It’s funny, Ravi and I, in our Tour catch-ups, have both felt that it was a massive mistake for David Brailsford (Ineos team boss) to have left both Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome at home in the way he did, to have not brought at least one of them. To have ignored the intangibles of what the presence of winners like that, two men who combined have won five Tours, three Olympic Gold medals and five World Championships, what that brings to a team spirit. When I see Luke Rowe - who I deeply admire - hamming it up for the camera after being dropped yesterday, I think of how Thomas, a man who once raced 18 stages of the Tour with a broken pelvis, such was his dedication to bring home the win, and how his presence would have brought a profound sense of that British, tougher-than-nails attitude to the team. Thomas would have slapped Bernal had he seen those public displays of emotion. But, when a team is being run by committee, as it now appears to be, cockups like this are to be expected. The Jumbo-Visma led the entire race, pulling the peloton along like big yellow and black locomotive, saving Wout van Aert for the crucial final climb. Demolition Man, as the Belgian is now known, stayed on the front of the Colombier for over eight-kilometers, crushing the life out of the peloton, reducing it to around 12 riders before Tom Dumoulin took over the pacemaking for the final stretch. It was only in the final 100-meters of the race that the Jumbo’s finally gave up the front of the race, as the irrepressible Tadej Pogačar jumped around a - fading - Primož Roglič for the win, taking the time bonus and reducing his second-place deficit to :40. That boy is worrisome. The Jumbo’s made a massive tactical error in the Pyrenees when, in a moment of self doubt, and in the middle of the race, Tom Dumoulin, announced that he was abandoning any personal ambitions for this Tour and dedicating himself to Roglič. The team director should have roared up in the car and talked some sense into him, because that move could very well cost them the Tour. Jumbo-Visma has one tactic now, to steamroll the race and hope that they can keep Pogačar at bay - which is not certain as the young man is simply surfing along, profiting from their work and tweaking their noses at the end. Don’t forget, he’s beaten Roglič twice now in head to heads for stage wins. If Dumoulin were still in play, had he not lost so much time, they could launch him in breakaways that Pogačar would then have to cover. Given that the young phenom’s team is as weak as it is, the one-two punch of Roglič and Dumoulin would eventually flatten him. Pogačar can clearly go toe-to-toe with Roglič which will make this final week of the Tour de France a delicious feast for us all.