TALKING POINTS
Cycling journalist Daniel Friebe shares his pick of the subjects that will have us all talking about the Tour
01 A chance for France Bardet de France
Romain Bardet represents possibly France’s best chance of a Tour win, at least since - sacré bleu - the hopes and naive illusions of a nation sunk in a pool of Richard Virenque’s tears during the 1998 Festina scandal (see page eight). Second last year, Bardet will relish a 2018 route that serves up the smallest helping of individual time trialling, his glaring weakness, for several decades. Even this patriotic gift from the Tour chiefs comes with a double curse - namely the pressure of knowing this course could offer a once-in-a-career opportunity, and also the fact that a 35km team time trial redresses some balance.
Bardet’s AG2R’s team is a more robust outfit than a year or two ago, but the timed line dance around Cholet still has the potential to derail their leader’s challenge. The same can probably be said about the stage nine bone-jangler over the cobbles made famous by Paris-Roubaix. Bardet sounded upbeat after a recce of those roads, and he’ll have an expert pathfinder in teammate Oliver Naesen.
Nonetheless, it is an old cycling dictum that good time triallers make good Paris-Roubaix riders… and Bardet is not a good time trialler. Should he confound our misgivings and give France its first winner since Bernard Hinault in 1985, the home nation will have a studious, intelligent and highly, maybe excessively for some tastes, image-conscious champion whose profile will soar. Bardet seems unlikely to ever establish a dynasty - fill his wardrobe with four or five yellow jerseys - but one will be enough to change his life and the course of his native land’s relationship with their greatest race.
EVEN IF MOVISTAR’S LOGIC PROVES SOUND, UNZUÉ MAY FIND HARMONY BETWEEN HIS THREE NOT QUITE AMIGOS HARD TO FIND Daniel Friebe
02 A rival for Sagan Fernando Gaviria
Peter Sagan’s reign of five consecutive green jerseys was broken last year by a controversial collision with Mark Cavendish on stage four and the Slovak’s subsequent disqualification. Normal, wheelie-pulling, showstealing Sagan service might well be resumed in July – but there is a chance that the world champion meets his match in 23-year-old Fernando Gaviria of Quick-Step and Colombia.
So different in origins - Sagan a converted mountain-bike prodigy from Eastern Europe, Gaviria a former track star from close to Medellín - the two riders possess similar skill sets and, it seems, personalities; they are both quick enough to beat all of the best sprinters on their day, both can out climb the same Kittels and Cavendishes, and both ride, move and talk with sprinklings of sass and a dash of mischief.
Gaviria’s obvious handicaps will be his lack of any Tour experience and his Quick-Step team’s broad sweep of other priorities, notably the general classification with Bob Jungels. Gaviria will also have to reckon with more than just Sagan, given that defending green jersey winner Michael Matthews will also be back. Nevertheless, with Cavendish, Kittel and Greipel all struggling for different reasons and to different extents, Gaviria may be debuting at the Tour at the perfect time to bring about a change of the guard, while also forestalling a resumption of the Sagan supremacy in the points competition.
03 Triple Threat Movistar’s strategy
One of the most decorated Tour de France team bosses of all time, Cyrille Guimard, uses an elaborate analogy about three-point stags to expound his theory about any team taking multiple leaders to the Tour. The basic gist is that, to Guimard’s mind, the tactic is akin to one of Baldrick’s cunning plans on Blackadder - outright, boneheaded folly.
Movistar’s chief strategist Eusebio Unzué didn’t play a key role in masterminding Miguel Indurain’s five Tour wins in the 1990s by being a dunce, so we can only assume he knew what he was doing when he announced in the winter that Alejandro Valverde, Nairo Quintana and Mikel Landa would all ride the Tour for Movistar. The last team to go in with a similar, three-pronged attack was T-Mobile in 2005, and by most measures that plan failed.
Even if Movistar’s logic proves sound, Unzué may find harmony between his three not-quite-amigos hard to find: Valverde is a popular figure in the team, but Landa can be unpredictable and Quintana’s taciturn, imperious leadership-style has often caused tension, including with Unzué. All of which suggests that we’re more likely to hear the clatter of antlers than the popping of champagne corks from this team come the end of July.
04 A tour first The Col du Pré
The Tour belatedly gets with the zeitgeist by tackling 2km of gravel road on the Plâteau de Glières on stage 10 in the Alps, but it may be a familiar climb the following day that gets the Alpine connoisseurs most excited. The Cormet de Roselend is a semi-regular Tour haunt, which many associate with the Frenchman Stéphane Heulot’s tearful withdrawal while in the yellow jersey in 1996. What the Tour has never done is ascend to the Cormet via the narrow, serpentine and devilishly steep route over the Col du Pré, until this year.
For fans attending the race, the summit of the Col du Pré might be the most picturesque vantage point of the whole Tour, with its peerless view across the Roselend Dam and towards Mont Blanc and the Pierra Menta - a gigantic rocky tooth protruding over the skyline of surrounding peaks.
05 Stormy sky Chris Froome
Not so much a talking point as a dark spectre that will overshadow and possibly even poison the race’s atmosphere: win, lose, draw or withdraw before the Tour even leaves the Vendée, Chris Froome’s ongoing salbutamol case will be a point of debate and contention.
There were strong rumours throughout the spring that, even if a verdict had not yet been announced and Froome was eligible, ASO and the UCI president David Lappartient would form a three-line whip to ensure Sky didn’t bring Froome to the Tour. In private, however, Sky’s embattled boss Sir Dave Brailsford was increasingly confident that his man will be cleared, and that the Tour and the UCI would finally have to acknowledge his innocence. Even a total exoneration won’t stem some of the venom sure to be aimed in Froome and Sky’s direction, or indeed forestall further revelations that may be in the pipeline. Expect at least one British newspaper to take their next swing on the eve of the Tour, as tradition dictates.
06 Roubaix Cobbles and wobbles
The boldest innovation on this year’s route might not be the new-fangled, made-for-TV, bitesize blockbuster over 65km in the Pyrenees, but an anachronism that will take place just over a week earlier. The five-time Tour winner, Bernard Hinault, once called Paris-Roubaix a “shitty-race”. By that he meant that tyre-shearing cobbled farm tracks had no place in a sport that has progressively become richer, slicker and in some ways more humane.
Roubaix takes place every year, but not for years has the Tour de France taken on such a daunting sequence of its infamous cobblestones, 21.7km in all, enough to prompt one leading team boss, Mitchelton-Scott’s Matt White, to predict “absolute carnage”.
Among the general classification contenders, Vincenzo Nibali has the least to fear on the evidence of his lithe, almost feline performances over the cobbles in previous cameos at the Tour, plus a remarkable debut in the Tour of Flanders in April. Chris Froome is ungainly but also an effective bike-handler. Alejandro Valverde’s technique and racing instincts offer the same guarantees as Nibali’s. At the other end of the potential calamity scale, one fears, will be Valverde’s teammates Nairo Quintana and Mikel Landa.
07 20 years on The Festina Affair
Major bike races, and the Tour de France in particular, rarely need any encouragement to mark and celebrate an anniversary, but the landmark of 20 years since the Festina doping scandal may well be an exception to that rule this year.
The organisers’ sheepishness notwithstanding, journalists will remind us that the arrest of the Festina team soigneur Willy Voet and seizure of his vast cargo of drugs at the Belgian border on the eve of the 1998 Tour not only scarred the race’s history but shaped the way it would be viewed in the future. Indeed, a case could be made for the Festina scandal being the single most important event in the Tour’s history. The question will also no doubt be asked, what has changed in those 20 years, given, for example, that the likely favourite, Chris Froome, is a rider who could soon be facing a doping ban? The reality is that Festina led to the creation of WADA [World AntiDoping Agency] and the stirrings of a revolution in the way that cycling and all sport dealt with doping.
That doesn’t mean that the Tour will be clean or that testing nowadays is infallible, neither of those statements would be true. Nevertheless, although July 8 1998, when Voet was arrested, is often described as the Grand Boucle’s darkest day, closely followed by Operación Puerto on the eve of the 2006 race, the denizens at Tour HQ in Paris really ought to be thankful that what seemed at the time like an apocalypse was allowed to happen. The next year’s race was dubbed the “Tour of Renewal” and was won by… Lance Armstrong, which just goes to show how painful, turbulent, but ultimately necessary and salutary the process has been.
08 New rules Eight-man teams
After an aborted attempt in 2017, the three Grand Tours finally forced through their proposal to reduce team sizes to eight riders this year. The thinking being that smaller teams mean less controlled, more entertaining races, and also a safer one with fewer riders fighting for space. So far, at least based on the Giro, the signs are that it has worked.
The difference may be greater at the Tour as this is where the standard is highest, mistakes are most severely punished and where teams get greediest, often trying to cram sprinters and GC men into the same line-up. With only eight places available, smarter team bosses may decide a narrower focus on one goal is the best approach.
09 Into the limelight Adam Yates
There was a time when Adam Yates seemed comfortably the more likely of the Yates twins to make a major impact on the world’s biggest races. Adam was anecdotally described as having more talent, and success in the WorldTour also came more quickly, with his victory in the Clasica San Sebastian in 2015. Three years on, suddenly it is Simon who has soared into the limelight, while Adam’s season has been solid but unspectacular thus far. However, Adam favours the longer, steadier climbs of the Tour de France and will also have welcomed the reduction in kilometres against the clock. Slightly inconveniently, Yates’s Mitchelton-Scott team has spread its resources across two fronts for the Tour, with sprinter Caleb Ewan requiring some of the manpower.
10 Intense pressure Mark Cavendish
Mark Cavendish’s 2018 season has picked up pretty much where his 2017 campaign landed on the tarmac, 100m short of the finish line in Vittel on stage four of last year’s race. The resulting crack in the Manxman’s shoulder blade cost him several months of racing, and there has been an assortment of other spills and too few thrills ever since. Now 33 years old and in the last year of his contract with Dimension Data, Cavendish will tell us that he is at a point in his career where only the Tour matters. That is true, but then this means that the stakes are stratospheric and the pressure on him this July intense, not least because he remains four wins short of Eddy Merckx’s Tour record of 34 stage victories.