RIDER DIARIES
UAE EMIRATES
Dan, Alex, George and Emilia
The 2019 Tour is a wrap. Some might be counting down the days until 2020, but I’m still feeling last month’s efforts. Only two stages had less than 2,000m of climbing. The constant undulations meant the race was a wearing-down process with a final showdown in the Alps which sadly failed to fully materialise. I’m unsure how those last days would have changed the race as we were all exhausted. The nature of the climb to Val Thorens meant that it could have been even less decisive had the stage been raced in its entirety due to the level of fatigue.
I often say that the rider who wins is the guy whose bad day is the least bad, and that’s modern cycling: a slow burn with the odd flash of excitement. To be a GC rider demands consistency. Epic attacks are impossible now that the difference in the level of the
best riders is so small. More often the gaps open up due to mistakes or paying for efforts made in the previous hours, days or weeks.
Julian Alaphilippe was the big revelation, though it’s hard to call the number one rider in the world a revelation! I know him well from our time as team-mates at Quick Step. He loves racing his bike. No power numbers or heart rate with him: he races on emotion. His attack to Épernay was incredible. Nobody was able to follow, but it was also early in the race and he wasn’t deemed a GC threat. There was no chase until the sprinters regained their composure, but by then Julian was well out of sight.
Stage 8 into Saint-Étienne was a different story. Thibaut Pinot followed his attack and nobody wanted to allow Thibaut to gain any time. That was simply a brutal stage that might not have come over on TV. We had nearly 4,000m climbing in high temperatures and an intense chase behind a strong breakaway all day. Everybody was cooked by the finish and because no-one had teammates to chase, the gap widened quickly.
Having two French guys riding so prominently was special. The roadside crowds seemed larger than last year, and then the Colombian fans started to appear as Egan Bernal’s Tour gathered momentum. Egan is clearly a special talent. He is quiet, humble but confident and contradicting what I said earlier, he won this Tour, the others didn’t lose it.
He was the only one able to attack and make a difference. How many Tours can he win?