Prepare yourself for Le Tour of unpredictability

The seven-time Tour de France rider looks ahead to this year’s race. Le Tour is big business with many of the world’s teams having annual budgets upwards of 30 million euro ($47 million).

The Tour de France is the most televised sporting event in the world. Every year the stakes are higher and the importance for those involved, from the sponsors to the riders and race organisers, seem to supersede previous editions. This year is no exception.

Le Tour is big business with many of the world’s teams having annual budgets upwards of 30 million euro ($47 million).

Coupled with the increasingly large salaries of the top riders, it is easy to understand the importance of winning.

However, it goes even deeper than this for a team like my own, Orica-Bike Exchange, where I am a performance manager.

In an environment where the media coverage is the currency that fuels the teams’ existence, Le Tour will generate 80 per cent of the total media coverage for a given season.

So even though in May we were second in the Giro d’Italia and won the biggest one-day race in the world earlier in the season, the cobbled classic, Paris-Roubaix, success at Le Tour dwarfs everything.

This year’s route begins in Normandy. It’s difficult bike racing countryside and reminds me of New Zealand’s geography with its exposed coastline, undulating technical roads and typically windy and wet conditions.

The key objective for the big favourites, Chris Froome, Nairo Quintana and Alberto Contador will be to survive the first stages crash-free, injury-free and in good health.

Monday’s third stage will see the march south to the Pyrenees and into Andorra, the first high mountain tests for the favourites. It will, however, be the back end of the Tour where the race is won.

There are many key stages, including the infamous Mont Ventoux, always one of the Tour de France’s toughest challenges, followed by back-to-back tough mountain stages in the Swiss and French Alps.

I see this as a year for little Colombian climbing star Quintana. Twice second in 2013 and 2015, he has proven his strength comes to the fore in the final week.

This year’s edition has a difficult last week so this will be something that’s well suited to him. We saw in 2015 he had Froome on the ropes in the final mountain stages, but was not quite able to take enough time back on him for the overall victory.

Three Kiwis will be on the start line in 2016. George Bennett will be getting his long-awaited debut and it will be the first time in a while we’ll see a Kiwi with climbing pedigree. He can go deep into the mountain stages in support of his team-mate, young Dutch star Wilco Kelderman.

Shane Archbold will also make his first appearance going head-tohead with Kiwi veteran Greg Henderson, as Archbold tries to lead his Irish sprinter, Sam Bennett, to victory for their German team, Bora-Argon 18.

Henderson lines up in what is by far the strongest lead-out train in the world, Belgian team Lotto Soudal, as they try to help their multiple Tour stage winner, Andre Greipel, add more victories to his palmares.

Predictions in the Tour are always a fickle game as three weeks of racing and 3519 kilometres is an enduring test of attrition and luck.

What we do know is that it will be tough and exciting and those who watch it late into the night are going to be, like the riders, feeling it at the end of July.