Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2021 i Procycling

As we go to press on this magazine, we’re midway through the last week of the Giro. It means multitasking - I’m writing and thinking about the Tour, while my television screen is showing the Giro. I’m making myself a hostage to fortune here but as I write, it looks like Egan Bernal has put himself in a winning position in Italy, and it’s thanks to two things: he’s the strongest rider, and he has the strongest team. That’s the best and safest place to be as a GC rider, and Ineos have won a lot of grand tours this way. However, looking ahead to the Tour, I would say that Ineos are going to be in the unusual position of having the strongest team, but not the strongest rider.…

The saddest thing about the shortening of stage 16 of the Giro d’Italia was that it won’t be the last time that races going through the high mountains will be altered. Climate change has already begun to shape the biggest races in cycling, and this was the latest example. Cycling is a sport that happens in the world, and so bears the brunt of whatever Mother Nature throws at it. When that is a peculiarly wet and cold spring, as we have seen in 2021, racing gets affected. Some of the greatest arenas of our sport are the high mountain passes, and if weather conditions make them impossible to climb, then we will be missing out on some of cycling’s most epic aspects. Interestingly, or just completely accidentally, Egan Bernal…

This is my 11th year as a pro, and I still care just as much as I ever did about the relationship between riders and their leaders. All professional cyclists have different demands and needs for their leader but I place honesty and authenticity in our interactions above all else. This must be there at all times, during good times and bad. As has mostly been the case every two years through my career, I’m coming to the end of my contract and I know how relations between employer and employee can sometimes diverge over the course a season. Since the start of my career, I’ve lived pretty much every scenario - to extend without ambiguity or discussion because everybody is happy; to change teams at the end of the…

Who are your top three? I want to be bold, but I can’t see past anyone other the Slovenians, or Ineos, winning. I think Roglič will come out on top, even if he does have a track record of wobbling in the final week. Pogačar is equally strong but I think he’ll be more prone to a mistake, which is all it will take, and his UAE team will be a weakness against Jumbo and a top-form Ineos. The latter will sandwich a rider between the two. Who else will be in the top 10? The usual suspects in Lopez, Uran, Kelderman, Landa, Guillaume Martin, and most likely the rest of the Ineos team. Who will be the surprise GC package? BikeExchange’s Lucas Hamilton has had an excellent season so…

Though there has been no single dominant sprinter in the last few Tours, there is still a clear hierarchy of favourites for the 2021 edition of la Grande Boucle. SAM BENNETT is probably just a little ahead of CALEB EWAN in sprinting form, even if the Australian still leads the Irishman 5-2 in terms of career Tour stage wins, and his Deceuninck-Quick Step team is acknowledged to be the most effective lead-out operation. The pair were the main protagonists in the sprints in the 2020 Tour, and Bennett also took home the green jersey. Behind this pair, WOUT VAN AERT and ARNAUD DÉMARE are the two biggest hitters. Van Aert is a multitasker, with classics wins, not to mention a cyclo-cross career and an outside chance of winning the time…

Little sleep will be had within the budget hotels of Valence on the evening of Tuesday 6 July. The world’s best riders will have enjoyed a relatively straightforward stage 10 of the 108th Tour de France. A sprinter will have won. Caleb Ewan, Sam Bennett, Arnaud Démare – take your pick. Turbo cool-down, protein intake, compression socks, shower, massage, evening meal and then rest. Or try to. For the following day sees La Grande Boucle’s first ever double ascent of Mont Ventoux. After 122km, the peloton will tackle the Giant of Provence from Sault, a grinding 24.3km ascent at five per cent gradient. Around 55km later, it’s the classic climb from Bedoin, a sharper 8.8 per cent average over 15.7km. Same mountain, two very different profiles. Whose star will rise?…

Hunched in the corner of a room in the centre of Atlanta, Jeannie Longo was hardly imposing. When I saw Eddy Merckx for the first time, I was struck by how tall he was, seemingly too big to climb, but in contrast the Frenchwoman seemed too slight to put out the power that had just won her the second Olympic medal of her career. Perhaps it was because most of the group around her were men: sports journalists who wanted to listen to her after she had won the silver medal in the 1996 Olympic Games time trial. Longo spoke eloquently, softly and with no bombast considering she was even then one of the greatest cyclists of her generation, probably one of the greatest athletes across the piece. I can’t…

Well, you know what they say. Never 156 without 157. Veteran André Greipel became the latest sprinter to roll back the years as he picked up his first win since 2019 and the 157th of his career, in the Trofeo Alcudia. The Mallorcan race had been postponed from its usual early-season slot to May, and the German sprinter beat fellow 30-something Alexander Kristoff to the win. And then he proved that there’s nothing like a win to help a sprinter pick up another win by also taking out the fourth stage of the Ruta del Sol. Greipel had shown signs of good sprinting form in the Tour of Turkey. However, he couldn’t quite get the better of his lifelong rival Mark Cavendish, who has himself been experiencing a bit of…

MOST WWT WINS Who has won the most different WWT races, going by those on this year's top ranking, out of active riders? We've also included stage wins, although multiple wins in the same race have been counted as one race here, meaning there are 25 in total. 13 MARIANNE VOS JUMBO-VISMA 11 ANNA VAN DER BREGGEN SD WORX 9 JOLIEN D’HOORE SD WORX STAGE RACER OF THE YEAR The best stage racer of 2021 so far has been Tadej Pogačar, the only rider to win two separate week-long competitions. Primož Roglič would likely have won two if it were not for his tumble at Paris-Nice earlier this season. With Roglič and Pogačar not currently down to ride the Dauphiné or Tour de Suisse, this table might look a bit…

When entering the team hotel, I noticed it already. It was the same all over again. I could tell in the nervous look on the staff’s faces and the amount of vehicles in the team parking area, such as an extra camper, a cooking truck and a mattress van. They were not vehicles we had at any other race. The staff dinner table was twice as long as normal. The cosy feeling from the first months of racing during the year with a small crew was totally gone, but on the upside, our riders’ table had good food. The team chef only came out for this race, back in the day. The Tour de France, because that’s obviously the race that I am talking about, is something else. You cannot…

30 Mark Cavendish has won 30 Tour stages, the most of any sprinter 8 Stages that could potentially finish in a sprint in this year’s Tour 10 Times the Tour has started in Lorient, the first time since 2018 The Tour de France organisers have gone go a lot of trouble to make sure that Brittany as a region gets its fair share of the 2021 Tour. Stage 1 started on the western coast at Brest; stage 2 on the northern coast. For the third day, we begin in Lorient, on the region’s south coast as it bends around to the Bay of Biscay, and we will finish in Pontivy, which sells itself as Brittany’s centre. In former times Pontivy was the crossroads of the region - the Nantes-Brest canal to the north…

9 Times that the Tour has visited Tours, this will be the first since 2013 72.6 Kilometres into the stage that the only categorised climb of the day comes 1:21 The time that Tadej Pogačar lost in the crosswinds at last year’s Tour Twice, Tours has found itself the capital city of France during periods of crisis. For a few days in both 1870, when the Prussians had Paris surrounded and then in 1940 as the Germans pushed in, the seat of government moved to the city. And it has also been a safe haven for international visitors. In their book The Land of France, published in 1939, Ralph Dutton and Lord Holden wrote, “There is an air of safety and domestic security about the town which, apart from the purity of the…

1 Time the Tour has finished in Tignes, in 2007, after the 2019 finish was cancelled 38.5 Kilometres that were lost in 2019 when bad weather neutralised the race 2,107 Metres in height of the finish line at Tignes, where riders train at altitude The physical geography of the Alps is France’s greatest gift to the Tour. However, the same forces that have created the mountainous backdrop to the world’s biggest bike race also render it vulnerable, and the Tour’s last visit to Tignes in 2019 was a case in point. Severe summer storms had loosened the soil and rock of the Val d’Isère, and just as the race was cresting the Col de l’Iseran, a landslide covered the road below in rocks and mud. Huge, seismic pressure has forced the Alps upwards;…

19 Nîmes has hosted the Tour de France 19 times in the past 116 years 5 Stage wins for Caleb Ewan, who won the last time the Tour visited Nîmes 162.5 The average distance in kilometres of Tour stages in 2021 For a city with a population of just 150,000, and historically a lot fewer than that, Nîmes has punched above its weight in its influence. For better or for worse, it gave France two of the 20th century’s iconic cultural touchstones: jeans and cigarettes. Without the material serge de Nîmes, commonly shortened to denim, we might not have had blue jeans. It was also the home of the 16th century physician Jean Nicot, who was the first to import tobacco to France, from Portugal. Nicot marketed the new drug as particularly effective…

2,408 Metres to the top of the Port d’Envalira, the highest point of this year’s Tour 57 Years since Andorra la Vella last hosted a finish of the Tour back in 1964 11.2 Kilometres of descending for the riders down to the finish line The isolated situation of Andorra, up in the heights of the Pyrenees between France and Spain, is a physical manifestation of the fact that it has long been a place apart. Its rarefied air and low taxes have also made it one of the biggest concentrations of professional cyclists anywhere, with scores of athletes making it their home. It sits between countries, but is happy in its self isolation - it adopted the euro but didn’t join the EU - though its unusual power structure means that it has…

66.2 After 66.2km, just before Asté, the Tour passes the 3,000km mark 85 The ascent of the Tourmalet will be the 85th time that it has featured 9 The Tour has finished in Luz Ardiden nine times, first in 1985 The Tour de France, we are often told, always need to modernise. Only by innovating and adapting can the sport and the Tour attract new fans. However, some things remain reassuringly traditional. The Tour has been visiting Pau since 1930, and the race comes back again and again, to the point that only Paris and Bordeaux have hosted the race more times. For 2021, the riders will start in Pau for the final mountain stage. The ville départ is not the only traditional thing about this stage. If the previous day’s visit to…

4 Mark Cavendish’s record for wins on the Champs-Élysées, from 2009 to 2012 16 Years since a breakaway won, when Vinokourov attacked in Paris 4 Years in a row that Chatou has hosted the start of the final Paris stage The idea of any other city than Paris being the capital of France is unthinkable. It is one of the world’s great capital cities, and even in the cycling niche, it is part of the iconography of the Tour. The race has finished on the Champs-Élysées every year since 1975 and it’s equally unthinkable to consider that ever being different. However, there is still a level of arbitrariness in Paris having become the capital. It enjoys a geographic advantage in that it lies at the convergence of several waterways - the valleys of…

La Course by Le Tour de France organiser ASO confirmed that 22 teams will take to the start line for the race this year, one down on the total last year, with all nine WorldTour squads automatically granted an invite, and a further 13 Continental squads selected. All five of the race’s previous winners are on different teams in 2021, although two-time champion MARIANNE VOS (who won the race in 2014 and 2019) is the only one not on a top level team, with her Jumbo-Visma squad making their race debut. The stature of the race, television coverage and publicity generated by its association with the men’s Tour means that La Course has consistently attracted an A-list start list in each of its seven editions, and that’s been reflected in…

22 There will be 22 teams on the start line for La Course by Le Tour de France in July. The nine WorldTour teams will be joined by 13 invited teams. The one-day race will start in Brest and finish with three laps of a 14km loop with the finish line atop the Côte de la Fosse aux Loups. “We want to change the world with bicycles. That’s very important for us, but we need a sponsor to stay alive” Despite the team’s three stage wins at the Giro, Victor Campenaerts reveals that Qhubeka-Assos need funds to continue in 2022. 59 The number of kilometres that were removed from stage 16 of the Giro d’Italia due to inclement weather. The Passo Fedaia and the Passo Pordoi were cut from the…

I live in a small town in the forest, about an hour and a half from San Francisco, near Santa Cruz. I grew up in Cupertino, the headquarters of Apple, and then I moved to Chicago for college and worked my way back to the west coast after. I started gymnastics when I was five. One of my mum’s colleagues had a daughter roughly my age who was into gymnastics and I think my mom was looking for some after-school activities for me to do and signed me up. I loved it and did it competitively until I was 17 and a half: the end of high school. I grew, so it became a lot harder, and I wanted to experience other things. I was a competitive kid. If someone…

Finally, for the first time this year, the Women’s WorldTour raced a stage race. I had been looking forward to the momentum of a stage race, and especially the challenging parcours of Vuelta Burgos. In a strange turn of events, I actually only completed two stages, as on the morning of stage 3, I stood up rapidly into a window that had swung directly over my head. I smacked it hard, drew a small amount of blood and was a DNS thanks to a mild concussion. Yep, it’s not my first rodeo when it comes to concussion, so when I felt like I was wandering aimlessly around on another planet, with a constant pressure in my head and nausea, it was decided I would sit the race out. Anyways, back…

Brittany has always been a region apart from the rest of France. In common with a few European regions with strong independent streaks and even ambitious breakaway tendencies - the Basque Country, Flanders, Catalunya, Yorkshire - it is the same as but different to the country of which it is part. By stereotype it’s the most chauvinistic and proud of the regions of mainland France and the locals consider themselves Breton first, and maybe French afterwards. It’s a region of acid soil, cornfields, water towers, chilly rain and granite crosses. Salty winds blow in from the Atlantic, and the ocean has battered and smashed the coast into rocky outcrops and headlands. The climate and relatively sparse population density have made this one of France’s breadbaskets. Though the soil quality might…

Who are your top three? It has to be a battle between Primož Roglič and Tadej Pogačar for the top spot. Just because of the amount of flat time trialling at this year’s race, I will plump for Roglič to take the maillot jaune. Geraint Thomas in third. Who else will be in the top 10? A couple more Ineos riders, let’s say Richard Carapaz and Tao Geoghegan Hart. Mikel Landa, Enric Mas, Wilco Kelderman, Rigoberto Uran, and Jakob Fuglsang make up my list. Who will be the surprise GC package? David Gaudu at Groupama-FDJ has the ability to capture the French public’s imagination, but is very unproven in time trials. Richie Porte might find himself up there, with a course that suits him and the pressure off. Which sprinter…

“OUR BONDS HAVE BEEN FORGED LITTLE BY LITTLE” This is how Tadej Pogacar described his relationship with Primož Roglic in an interview he conducted with L’Equipe in September of last year after the younger Slovenian snatched the yellow jersey away from his older countryman in a dramatic final time trial on La Planche des Belles Filles. It was one of the most stunning upsets in contemporary cycling history, a turn of fate that turned Pogacar into a household name and created the start of a redemption arc for Roglic that would result in victories at both Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Vuelta a España later in the season. It also ensured that the stories of these two men would become inextricably linked for the foreseeable future, if not forever, in the way…

Nobody has ever won a fourth Tour de France and not gone on to win a fifth, and Chris Froome, currently stuck on four wins, has no intention of becoming the first person to do so. However, nobody has come back from the kind of injuries Chris Froome suffered in his terrible training crash in June 2019 at the Criterium du Dauphiné and gone on to win the Tour de France either, and the general feeling in the cycling world is that he has won his last grand tour. Cyclists break bones almost routinely, but Froome broke a femur, an elbow, a vertebra in his neck, a hip, his sternum and several ribs. It was serious, health-threatening structural damage, and never mind getting back to winning races again; first he…

WIN Stage, Tour de l’Ain 2017 Stage, Tour de Romandie 2019 Stage, Vuelta a España 2020 (2) Ardèche Classic 2021 Stage, Itzulia Basque Country 2021 SECOND Boucles de l’Aulne - Châteaulin 2017 Tour de l’Ain 2017 Memorial Marco Pantani 2018 Stage, Tour de Romandie 2019 THIRD Stage, UAE Tour 2019 (2) UAE Tour 2019 Liège-Bastogne-Liège 2021 FOURTH Route Adélie de Vitré 2017 Stage, Tour de l’Ain 2018 GP Bruno Beghelli 2019 Stage, UAE Tour 2020 (2) UAE Tour 2020 Stage, Tour des Alpes-Maritimes et du Var 2021 Stage, Itzulia Basque Country 2021 FIFTH Stage, Tour de l’Ain 2016 Tour de l’Ain 2016 Milano-Torino 2017, 2019 Ardèche Classic 2018 Stage, Tour de Romandie 2019 Tour de Romandie 2019 Itzulia Basque Country 2021…

7 This will be the seventh time that Brittany has hosted a grand depart 32 Brest has now featured in 32 editions of the Tour de France 7 The Tour has begun with a road stage seven times in the last decade According to the 17th century French author François Savinien d’Alquié, who wrote Les Délices de la France, a guide to the regions of his country, the people of Brest were “gentle, frank and love an easy life”. They might not have enjoyed stage 1 of the 2021 Tour de France, which starts in the country’s most westerly city, therefore. The Tour sometimes gives the riders a gentle introduction to things on day one; this year the race will climb and descend incessantly. The profile resembles the tooth of a saw, perhaps…

0 There are no categorised climbs in today’s stage, the first flat day 4 Times that the Tour has passed through or been to Fougeres in the last decade 184 There will be 184 riders across 23 teams riding in this year’s Tour Honoré de Balzac’s novel Les Chouans, set in post-revolutionary Fougères, tells the story of an aristocratic lady, a spy for the republicans, who is sent to subdue and capture a Royalist insurrectionist, against the backdrop of the city’s antirevolutionary uprising of 1799. Of course she falls in love with him instead, and tragedy ensues. Les Chouans was Balzac’s first novel, and he later grouped it into his life’s work La Comédie Humaine. The Comédie Humaine is a huge collection of 91 finished and a further 46 unfinished works, delving into…

97.8 97.8km into the stage, at La Baratte, the 2021 Tour will pass 1,000km 21 Years since the Tour rode a stage longer than this; stage 20 in the 2000 Tour 30 Kilometres longer than the longest stage of the 2020 Tour de France What is the Tour de France, but a historical artefact seeking relevance in the modern world? Its heyday was in the 1950s, when it held the attention of the nation. These days it is seen in France as an event followed by old people. Of course, the Tour is dealing with this challenge by reinventing itself. The old way of doing things - selling the race as an epic test of endurance unfolding slowly over three weeks - is being supplanted by the modern need for excitement and action.…

651 Different individual stage winners in Tour history ahead of the 2021 edition 12 Stage wins for Peter Sagan, one of which came in Valence in 2018 10 Previous stage appearances for Albertville and Valence collectively Valence sits right on the banks of the river Rhône. Though the town is entirely within the bounds of the Drôme, and indeed is the département’s capital, the border between the Drôme and the Ardèche runs down the middle of the river. At the same time, there is a popular French expression: ‘A Valence, le midi commence’ - Valence is where the south begins. It’s a town that is defined by its position on borders. It separates two départements, one west of the Rhône, one east. It marks the place where the south of France begins. In…

8.5 After 8.5km, just before Calvisson, the Tour passes its 2,000km mark 2 The last time a stage finished here, two riders sprinted for the win 1.9 This year’s second longest stage is 1.9km longer than the longest in 2020 For the millenium celebrations in France, the government decided that one of the main events would be the ‘world’s biggest picnic’. It was to be a 600km long line linking the north of the country all the way to the south and for people to indulge in one of the nation’s favourite pastimes - the unfolding of a red and white checked tablecloth, the popping of a wine cork and the breaking open of a baguette for plein-air refreshment. The events would take place on Bastille Day 2000, along the Paris Meridian. Under…

643 Metres lost in height before the road starts to head upwards 7 Kilometres from the finish that the final categorised climb will be crested 59 Years since Tom Simpson wore the yellow jersey in Saint-Gaudens Saint-Gaudens, in the heart of the Pyrenees, is a small town whose peace and quiet has only ever really been interrupted by the GP des Comminges, a motorsport event which took place on the roads around the town in the first half of the 20th century, and occasional appearances in the Tour de France. But it also has a connection to that other great competitive international institution, the Eurovision Song Contest. It is the home of 1960 Eurovision winner Jacqueline Boyer, whose chanson ‘Tom Pillibi’ wowed the juries of the participating countries. ‘Tom Pillibi’ tells the story…

59 Categorised climbs in this year’s Tour, of which today’s is penultimate one 2 Libourne has hosted a finish twice before, but this is the first road stage 3 Stages over 200km at this year’s Tour de France, two more than last year Travel writing, or at least the experience of its creators, has changed somewhat in the modern world. In his book Voyages en France, the author Charles Delattre reported that he’d wrestled with bears, been waylaid by Spanish smugglers, nearly drowned in a tidal wave on the Dordogne river and been sucked into a bog in the Landes region. The riders of the Tour, who will cross the interminable forested flatlands of the Landes between Mourenx and Libourne, should be safer than Delattre, who, it’s safe to say, may have embellished…

There we go, back in the peloton. It feels strange to write this now after the month I’ve had but I feel like I’ve re-found the rhythm of racing and training so much that on reflection, I realise that I’d almost forgotten the fact that a month ago I was preparing for only my second race day of the season. I suppose it’s not a huge surprise given that we’re all wired to be in this week-on, week-off cycle, but it genuinely does feel very normal. However, I don’t want you all to think that it just clicked in place as if I hadn’t missed two months of racing! The Tour de Romandie is already an incredibly tough race with long, steep climbs, a high level as people prepare for…

Who are your top three? Hard to choose between Pogačar and Roglič for the top spot, but I suspect Pog will shade it - I think Roglič wants it too badly, and that will get in his way. Geraint Thomas in third, because the course suits him best of Ineos’s leaders. Who else will be in the top 10? More Ineos riders: Carapaz and one of Porte and Geogeghan Hart. Movistar have two strong options in Mas and Lopez and they should both be up there, along with Bahrain’s Landa. Beyond that, it’s actually quite open. One last top 10 for Mollema after his interval training at the Giro? Gaudu is having a good year, so he may end up best Frenchman. Who will be the surprise GC package? I…

Two seasons have almost passed since a slight and sodden figure clad in the white, red and green of UAE Emirates pedalled his way past crunchy clumps of fallen hailstones from the afternoon’s thunderstorms in the high sierras of Andorra, en route to a breakthrough win in a grand tour. The first week of the 2019 Vuelta a España had been quiet for Tadej Pogacar, but on a short, intense stage when the race crossed the border for a 100km mountain trek through the Pyrenean principality, the young Slovenian found his stride. GC riders as experienced as Primož Roglic and Miguel Ángel López had crashed heavily in the freak rain and hail showers that battered the hour-long, 25km grind up to the summit finish of Cortal d’Encamp, and another promising…

More than four hours separated Marcel Kittel from the yellow jersey the first time he finished a Tour de France, in 2013, and an outsider would be forgiven for not believing he was the quickest man in the race. But Kittel’s story is that of a pure sprinter who, at the height of his career, was arguably both the fastest and the slowest rider in the peloton, destined to endure weeks of suffering on Europe’s toughest climbs in pursuit of the supernova flat sprints that saw him take the WorldTour by storm. Now, a study of Kittel’s performances in the Tours of 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017, during which he won 14 stages against generational fastmen including Mark Cavendish, André Greipel, Peter Sagan and Alexander Kristoff, has laid bare the…

For the second year in a row, Ineos Grenadiers go into the Tour de France in the unusual position of not being the favourites to take the yellow jersey. Unusual, anyway, for a team who have dominated the race for the last decade, winning seven titles in Paris in the last nine editions. The 2020 Tour was the first time since 2014 that Ineos didn’t place a rider on the top step in Paris - they didn’t even place a rider in the top 10 overall. The reasons that 2020 was such a disappointing Tour for Ineos are many: indecision and last-minute roster changes in the weeks before the grand départ; rider injuries that worsened during the race; the pressure on defending champion Egan Bernal. The sudden death last spring…

STINE BORGLI BEST RESULT 1ST VUELTA A BURGOS, STAGE, 2019 JOINED TEAM: 2020 MARTA CAVALLI BEST RESULT 1ST NATIONAL CHAMPS RR, 2018 JOINED TEAM: 2021 BRODIE CHAPMAN BEST RESULT 1ST RACE TORQUAY, 2020 JOINED TEAM: 2020 CLARA COPPONI BEST RESULT 1ST GRAND PRIX D’ISBERGUES, 2019 JOINED TEAM: 2020 EUGÉNIE DUVAL BEST RESULT 10TH, BRUGGE DE PANNE, 2020 JOINED TEAM: 2015 EMILIA FAHLIN BEST RESULT 1ST CRESCENT VÅRGÅRDA, 2016 JOINED TEAM: 2019 MAËLLE GROSSETÊTE BEST RESULT 1ST NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS TT U23 JOINED TEAM: 2018 VICTORIE GUILMAN BEST RESULT 2ND, NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS, 2017 JOINED TEAM: 2016 LAUREN KITCHEN BEST RESULT 1ST GRAND PRIX D’ISBERGUES JOINED TEAM: 2018 MARIE LE NET BEST RESULT 2ND, WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS JUNIOR RR JOINED TEAM: 2019 CECILIE UTTRUP LUDWIG BEST RESULT 1ST GIRO DELL’EMILIA JOINED TEAM: 2020 ÉVITA…

HIPSTER GC BATTLES SIBIU CYCLING TOUR 3-6 July | Romania | 2.1 This relatively small Romanian race gained a whole new legion of fans last summer, when it was more or less the first race that took place after the covid-19 lockdown. It was dominated in 2020 by Bora-Hansgrohe, who were one of the two WorldTour teams present. They won two stages. Intriguingly, in recent years it has also been won by Egan Bernal and Ivan Sosa while they were with Androni, before the Colombian pair went on to ride for Ineos. GVA WATCH BELGIAN NATIONAL CHAMPS 16-20 June | Belgium | CN Greg van Avermaet has raced the Belgian National Championships road race 14 times consecutively, in a run going back to 2007, and yet has never finished higher…

3 Times that Mur-de-Bretagne has hosted a finish, the last in 2018 6 Categorised climbs on the second stage, with the Mur being ascended twice 2 Tour de France stages Dan Martin has won, including one here in 2018 Six climbs already done, and six more to come today. Brittany’s lasting legacy on the 2021 Tour will be the memory of constant climbing, and the organisers are doing their best to ensure that the memory sticks by finishing the first two stages up steep hills. The last memory is always the most vivid. And just to make sure that the finish of stage 2 at Mûr-de-Bretagne is indelibly imprinted on the minds of the peloton, they’re going to have to ride it twice in the finale, once with 15km to go and once…

55.446 The record breaking speed in km/h that Rohan Dennis won the 2015 prologue 58 Kilometres of individual timetrialling this year, the most since 2013 8.8 The distance in kilometres that the first time check will be taken Laval’s most famous son may be the dissolute flâneur, absinthe enthusiast and absurdist writer Alfred Jarry. Jarry lived an eventful but short life in the late 19th century, and coined a spoof philosophy of science which he called pataphysics. In pataphysics, Jarry wrote, every event in the universe is accepted as an extraordinary event. He might have made an exception for Tour de France time trials. Pataphysics toyed with the idea of reality and its interpretation, but the time trial is, as every cycling fan knows, the race of truth. It would truly be an…

8.9 Per cent average gradient of the Col de Romme, which lasts for almost 9km 14.7 Kilometres from the finish that riders will crest the Col de la Colombière 5 Classified climbs feature on stage 8, three of which are category one The Alps are not like the rest of France. Obviously the physical geography has got a lot to do with that. France isn’t particularly densely populated, because of its size, but in the rest of the country, there’s not much distance between most settlements and there are large urban centres spread evenly around. The Alps are sparser - there’s a whole lot more landscape there, and plenty of nature but you could argue there is a little less culture. There are fewer humans and fewer towns. They are also a relatively…

17 Times previously Ventoux has been in the Tour since its debut in 1951 8.8 The average per cent gradient of the second ascent of Ventoux over 15.7km 22 Kilometres of descent from the top of Mont Ventoux into Maluacène Upon reaching the summit of Mont Ventoux on April 26, 1336, the Renaissance poet and humanist Petrarch exclaimed, “I was happy at my progress, I wept for my imperfections and I took pity on the common inconstancy of human action.” If any climb in the 2021 Tour is going to expose the imperfections of the race favourites, it’s the legendary Giant of Provence. The Ventoux is one of the hardest single climbs in France. The ascent from Bédoin takes the riders straight up through a forest where the air is thick and oppressive…

50.9 The distance into the stage that the first categorised climb comes 9 Per cent average gradient of the Côte de Gallinagues, over just 2.2km 42 Categorised climbs in the 2021 Tour, by this point two weeks into the race The Col de Montségur, which comes about halfway through stage 14 and is probably the sternest test of a very tricky route, sits below the Château de Montségur, the razed ruins of a Cathar stronghold. The Cathars were dualist Christians who thrived in the Languedoc region in the first half of the second millenium AD. Dualists, like cyclists, hold that life and existence revolves around the eternal conflict between opposite concepts. For dualists, good versus evil is the eternal battle. For cyclists the struggle is more prosaic: Roglic v Pogacar, climbers v time…

115 Kilometres before the stage starts to head upwards, after leaving Luchon 2,018 Metres of climbing across the stage, which ends with an HC climb 4 Hors-Catégorie climbs feature four times this year, the same as 2020 It was only in 1659 that the Pyrenees were formally conceded to be the natural frontier for the border between France and Spain. The Treaty of the Pyrenees, signed that year, put an end to 24 years of war between the two countries, and defined the border as “the crest of the mountains which form the watersheds for the rivers of France and Spain”. In other words, the border is always the highest point between the two territories (though time and realpolitik have resulted in a few anomalies). The Col du Portet is the highest summit…

5.4 At 30.8km, the race’s second time trial is 5.4km shorter than last year’s time trial 50.433 The speed in km/h that Jan Ullrich won the last time trial to finish here, in 1996 1:56 Last year’s penultimate stage time trial saw a swing of 1:56 Never give up, will be the motto of the rouleurs through the 2021 Tour, and this stage is where their patience may be rewarded. The final GC day of the race gives the time trial specialists a chance to shine, and, who knows, perhaps even win the Tour. Last-day reversals in the world’s biggest race are rare, but as we learned last year, they are not impossible. Going into today’s stage, the GC riders’ strategies will have been made clear. The climbers will have attempted to put…

IN ASSOCIATION WITH CLASSIFICATIONS KEY GC Points Mountains Young rider Team AG2R CITROEN TOURS RIDDEN 27 HIGHEST GC IN 2020 26th STAGE WINS 19 CLASSIFICATIONS WON For the first time since 2012, Ag2r will be without Romain Bardet at the Tour. With the French climber now at DSM, the team is on a journey of reinvention, as they move on from being a GC outfit to something else. It remains unclear what that something else is, with a lack of clear definition so far in 2021. GREG VAN AVERMAET is sure to start in France, after transferring from CCC last season. The Belgian has had a mixed couple of years results wise, but third place at the Tour of Flanders suggested some form returning. Van Avermaet has spent 11 days in the yellow…