A Cruel Start

I was there in San Sebastian, 31-years ago, the last time the Tour held its Grand Depart on the Iberian Peninsula.  It was my first time with ESPN, brought on a mission to provide what was then - 1992 - considered a television miracle: same-day coverage of the Tour for the American audience. The race was designed to honor the Masstricht Treaty - the creation of the European Union - and as such, we went from Spain to France, up to Belgium and Holland, over to Germany, through Luxembourg, back down the east side of France and into Italy before returning to France and the finish in Paris.

It was in San Sebastian that we all witnessed the Miguel Indurain whom would become an unstoppable force for years to come. I remember staring at the giant TV screens as he blew around the prologue time trial course, looking unlike anything we’d ever seen and realizing that a new era had begun. It was also in San Sebastian that the ETA (Basque separatist movement) planted a bomb in the carpark underneath our TV compound, destroying Phil Liggett’s and Paul Sherwin’s car, all their clothes and for Phil, in that pre-cloud, pre-backup hard drive era, all his Olympic notes - on paper mind you - gathered over years of research. Phil spent the next two-weeks doing the morning standups (Phil and Paul in front of the camera) enveloped in my large blazer, before replacement clothing could get to him in that much less connected world.

 Stage One of this 2023 Tour, Bilbao to Bilbao, was a 3300-meters climbing classic, a 182-kilometer Basque version of Liege-Bastogne-Liege. There were two hard climbs in the last 30-kilometers and the peloton burst into action, racing at incredible speeds both up, and, to the detriment of Spanish speaking fans on the old and new continents, down. Enrique Mas, the Spanish hope and the Olympic Champion, Ecuador’s Richard Carapaz, crashed on an 80-kph+ turn. Mas was immediately out, Carapaz limped to the finish with a cracked knee, but their Tours were finished, and the race had lost two exceptional talents, both of whom would have made the next three-weeks that much more enjoying and exciting. A truly tragic occurrence, the cruelty of cycling on full display.

Of course, the race waits for no one and up front the boys were raging. Carapaz’s teammate, the excellent Neilsen Powless took the KOM points on the penultimate climb, putting him in the Polka Dot jersey, a recompense for their EF Education-EasyPost podium hopes being crushed by that crash. Tadej Pogacâr’s UAE team exploded into action on the final côte de Pike climb, 2-k at 10%, blowing the race into pieces. Near the top only Pogačar, defending Tour winner Jonas Vingagaard and the surprising Frenchman Victor Lefay remained. Vingegaard went passive allowing a slight regrouping from behind including Pogačar’s UAE teammate Adam Yates, who the Slovenian, with his ever-aggressive racing spirit, sent directly on the attack. Yates was joined by….Yates - his twin brother from the Australian Jayco-ALUla team - and the twins raced together to the finish with Adam proving the stronger in the end. Pogačar won the sprint for third, gobbling up the 10” time bonus with Adam, the first Yellow Jersey of this 2023 Tour, completing a day of physical and tactical triumph for the UAE squad. For their team manager, Joxean Matxin, a man born in Bilbao, a better homecoming could not have been imagined. The Basque public cheered for him as much as for any of the racers.