The Grand Snooze
The Tour De France has started and I’m not happy. Not happy at all.
Le Grand Depart of everyone’s favourite cycling race is in the cycling mad country of Denmark. Thousands of happy, healthy looking Scandinavians lined the roads for the weekend cheering the peloton’s progress through the pancake flat, sun-drenched countryside. Even when the weather didn’t play ball for Friday’s opening individual time trial the crowds in Copenhagen created an electric atmosphere for local heroes like Jonas Vinnegaard. There was stunning imagery, with the iconic and excellently named 18km Great Belt Bridge aka “3rd longest suspension bridge in the world”, as we were repeatedly reminded by commentators, closed to facilitate the race. There was even some romance with the results. Two years after he was placed in a medically induced coma, following that horrific crash at the Tour of Poland, Fabio Jakobsen went and won the sprint after the bridge. And to complete the circle, Dylan Groenewegen, the culprit for that crash (assuming you exonerate the UCI and race organizers for allowing a downhill sprint finish at 80 km/h), won the very next day. Surely only a grinch could have anything bad to say about Denmark’s opening of the Tour de France? (And I appreciate even the second half of that last sentence is highly confusing for non cycling fans).
Cue mini rant: The international Grand Depart is a PR stunt designed to win more international fans for Le Tour. The general classification stars, and in fact most of the peloton with the exception of local riders, see it as something that must be endured rather than embraced. Get back to France safely and then the real racing can begin. Was it any wonder that The Cycling Podcast devoted a section to the logistics of getting back to France while the doyen of team principals, Patrick Levefre was complaining bitterly about the fuel costs of getting his impoverished team back to Dunkerque on time for tomorrow’s stage?
Those of us who had been counting down the days to the first Tour in three years not to be impacted in some way by Covid, felt much the same way. The Danes were amazing hosts - lining the road 10 deep to see the peloton flash through their town, village or crossroads at 40km - but for most of us, the Tour’s 1,000 km detour to Denmark, was just a bit…anticlimactic.
(The media seems to feel similarly - even the editor in chief of Cycling Tips couldn’t be arsed to go to the tour until it returns to France)
A short individual time trial and two sprint stages was never exactly going to spice things up on the first weekend. But from a purely racing perspective Denmark disappointed. The much-hyped echelons on the Great Belt never materialized - probably because the teams were on edge to expect them and so made sure gaps didn’t emerge. The sprint stages were like a large, tightly formed club ride for until the sprinters team oiled on the gas in the closing kilometers.
In a country whose highest point is at a vertigo-inducing 171 metres, the big racing story was the domination of the king of the “mountains” classification by local favourite Magnus Cort. The EF EasyPost rider won all 6 available points on offer over the first 3 days which is apparently some kind of record and definitely a feel good story. Actually a very good feel good story. Although the ease with which Cort was allowed up the road on stage 3 in a solo breakaway to lap up the admiration of his nation, suggests the polka dot classification was more of a parade and less of a race.
Other than that the big talking points of Le Grand Snooze were relatively minor crashes (the unexpected yellow jersey Yves Lampaert being the most high profile) and Stefan Kung being fined for shaking the head of EF rider Rubén Guerreiro (apparently he felt the EF rider was looking around too much and causing a danger). If they're the highlights it doesn’t exactly suggest that we had a riveting three days of racing.
Denmark has been an amazing spectacle. But I can’t wait until the real action begins tomorrow.