GUESSING GAME...
Froome, Thomas, Bernal?
One of the biggest winners from the Tour de France being pushed back is Chris Froome. His horrendous crash at the Dauphine last June had the air of the career-ender about it, and his desire at the start of the year to return to the Tour in 2020 and win it for a fifth time seemed an uphill task, given how quickly sport moves on. The pandemic layoff, however, has not only given him more time to recover but held back his rivals who’d gone into the season in a better place.
So it’s all to play for, not just with the wider peloton but also within his own team. Dave Brailsford will need to summon all his well-honed powers of man management to keep a team together that consists of, alongside Froome, Egan Bernal and Geraint Thomas, the last three Tour de France winners – each having designs on the yellow jersey themselves. The situation was complicated further still with the revelation in July that Froome would be leaving Ineos for Israel Start-Up Nation for 2021. A rider on his way out of a team has only one card left to play: clear dominance on the road.
A Tour like no other?
We could easily fill this entire supplement – and possibly the whole of issue 370 of Cycling Plus – with a discussion on how the Covid-19 pandemic will affect this year’s Tour de France, so please excuse our brevity as we attempt to sum it up in a few hundred words! Public opinion feels like it’s slowly shifted from unease that the race has even been rescheduled for this year – particularly as so many major sports events, such as the Olympics, Wimbledon and football’s Euros have been postponed or cancelled – to quiet optimism and pleasure that we’ll see cycling’s showpiece race this summer.
Because make no mistake – few sports need their biggest deal to go ahead like cycling does with the Tour de France, given it’s a sport that so heavily relies on visibility for sponsors. Cancellation seems unthinkable, and that extends to much of the calendar: it’s why the UCI decided to cram almost the entire WorldTour season into three months from August to October – a situation EF Education First boss Jonathan Vaughters called a circus. Teams would fold, jobs would be lost, should the whole season be squandered.
It’ll certainly be a Tour like no other. Even in normal times the race often feels like a travelling circus anyway, barrelling into town for a day like a whirlwind and leaving just as quickly. But all the trimmings of the race that make it so unique – the heaving area around the buses each morning, the proximity of riders and fans, packed mountain passes – simply can’t happen in this time of social distancing. However, whereas fans are so fundamental to the stadium experience, cycling at least has the grand canvas of France at its disposal. The mountain tops might be deserted, but it won’t feel as empty as, say, Premier League football has this summer.
Opportunity knocks?
Despite pundits and fans routinely hyping scores of riders as potential Tour de France winners, the eventual victor tends to have the feeling of the preordained about it. When was the last winner a genuine surprise? Even Egan Bernal – whose win in 2019 made him the youngest winner, at 22, in over a century – was the favourite going in. While class is enduring and the usual suspects like Froome, Bernal and Tom Dumoulin will likely be in the mix, has there been a Tour where the winner is more up in the air? It leaves the door ajar for up-and-coming and nearly-men to stake their claim. Two in the former camp include Emanuel Buchmann (Bora-Hansgrohe), who finished a strong fourth place last year, and Tadej Poga ar (UAE Team Emirates), third in the 2019 Vuelta a Espana. The 21-year-old Slovenian has the potential to make a similar impact as Bernal last year, but like every other team in the world, the powerful Jumbo-Visma aside, his team can’t match the firepower and strength in numbers that Bernal has at Ineos.
The only predictable thing about this year’s race will be its unpredictability. We dissect the talking points of a highly unusual Tour de France
Guessing game?
We occasionally run a predictions feature in our Tour de France guide, but even the sagest members of the press pack would struggle to come up with anything close to cogent for the 2020 race. Riders tend to spend the spring racing a mix of one-day classics and week-long stage races, but with most of the planet on various forms of lockdown, many have had to rely on indoor training to get by. Of course, professionals have a phenomenal base fitness to fall back on, and it’s not like they’ve not been able to stay fit – it’s just been different. You might describe it as an injury lay-off without the injury, or where a doping suspension might see you end up.
Perhaps the intense nature of indoor training might have an effect on how the race pans out. In early May, having spent seven weeks at home in Girona, South African pro racer and Olympian Ashleigh Moolman Pasio headed straight for her local climb, the 9.9km Rocacorba, and knocked three and a half minutes off her record time. Altitude natives like Bernal, who was able to train outdoors from his home in Zipaquirá, Colombia (alt: 2650m) from late April, may have an edge, though the rest of the peloton will be thankful the race only exceeds 2000m twice, both on stage 17.
How might riders react, physically and mentally, to racing the biggest race of the season amid the most serious pandemic for a century (James Witts searches for answers in the next feature). It’s anyone’s guess who will be going well come the start of the Tour, given only five WorldTour races (the maximum length being the five-day Critérium du Dauphiné) will have taken place since March. It’s a blast from the past to the days of Lance Armstrong, where he, and others, would pitch up in France having either not raced seriously all year long.
Testing times?
The Tour won’t start, or get close to completion, without a thorough and continued programme of testing for Covid-19 across all the teams. If the race normally resembles a travelling circus, this year it has more potential to be a petri dish on wheels, so it’s vital that flare-ups of the virus are damped down before they take off.
But for the integrity of the sport, it’s another type of testing – drug testing – that has raised some alarm. Cyclingnews.com revealed in May that there had been a 95 per cent drop in doping tests in the early weeks of lockdown, owing to the travel restrictions in place. Thibaut Pinot (Groupama-FDJ) complained to French newspaper L’Equipe in April that he hadn’t been tested in six months. While the threat of being tested hasn’t gone away, with the World AntiDoping Agency’s (WADA) Whereabouts programme still in operation, restrictions on movement and the temporary closure of laboratories has undoubtedly made antidoping efforts a logistical headache in 2020. And with pro cycling’s history being what it is, it’s hard to shake the fear that there will be riders who see opportunity in the cover of darkness.