TURN BACK TIME
Long seen as a boring, thrill-killing anachronism by many fans, could the time trial - after the tension and fireworks of last year’s final face-off at La Planche des Belles Filles - re-emerge as an indispensable component of an exciting Tour de France?
"There are teams that don’t have TT specialists who will plan to be aggressive, but to be brutally honest even they know they are effectively planning guerilla warfare. It’s romantic, but ultimately futile” David Millar
To butcher Mark Twain’s famous quote about his own demise, reports of the death of the Tour de France individual time trial, it turns out, have been grossly exaggerated. With 58km against the clock across two key stages, the 2021 route represents something of a renaissance for the discipline after years of swingeing cuts. Many will bemoan the presence of the most TT kilometres in eight years, but 2020’s final competitive stage to La Planche des Belles Filles was proof that these individual efforts can produce spectacular racing and be key to an exciting battle for yellow. So why did they almost disappear? Is this really the beginning of the fight back? And, if it is, should we embrace it?
First, a potted history. After introducing a time trial into the Tour de France in 1934 with a 90km test between La Roche-sur -on and Nantes, race organiser Henri Desgrange was quickly won over by the concept. A year later, for his final race in charge, he included six of them. The discipline has been ever-present in the Tour route since then, but the last decade has seen its presence diminished and the number of kilometres against the clock slashed. The paltry 14km of the 2015 route proved to be an anomaly, but the trend towards fewer TT miles has been definite and clear since the mid-2000s, with 2012’s 96km that helped power Bradley Wiggins to victory as much of an outlier as 2015.
The idea behind this reduction in solo action was to up the race’s thrill factor, keep things tight into the final week and produce a Tour that could be won in the mountains. The relative lack of time trialling prowess among France’s best General Classification (GC) contenders being merely a coincidence, of course.
HORSES FOR COURSES
Certainly the lack of time trials has kept the time gaps at the top of the GC race incredibly close in recent years, and only Vincenzo Nibali in 2014 has won the Tour de France by more than five minutes in the last decade. But without a decent TT stage to mix things up a lead of one minute can actually be extremely comfortable, and none of Chris Froome’s four Tour wins, for example, ever felt remotely precarious or threatened.
David Millar, multiple time-trial Tour stage winner turned pundit for ITV’s coverage of the race, believes TTs are central to a Grand Tour: “The whole point of a Grand Tour is to allow all horses to have their courses, that way the best rider wins.”
As to whether they naturally create better racing on other stages, the former Tour de France yellow jersey is more reserved.
“I think longer TTs within the race shape the training and team selection from the moment people know about them,” he tells us. “For sure there are teams that don’t have TT specialists who will then plan to be aggressive, but to be brutally honest even they know they are effectively planning guerilla warfare. It’s romantic, but ultimately somewhat futile.”
Fellow ex-pro Dan Lloyd, who is now an integral part of GCN+’s Tour team and the channel's live racing coverage, agrees: “Time trials definitely have their place in stage races, and particularly Grand Tours, but I think the organisers have made the correct decision in making them shorter and less frequent,” he tells us. “If we went back to the days of old with 60km time trials (I seem to remember doing one myself at the Giro in 2009 or 2010), the gaps are just too big between the good and not so good ‘testers’.”
But mountain stages no longer provide the time gaps they once did, the levelling up of nutrition techniques and training methods, plus the extensive use and understanding of power data, giving taller, heavier riders the ability to stick with the pure climbers on even the toughest slopes. Most mountain stages are now reduced to a war of attrition, with riders steadily dropping off the back of the lead group rather than anyone successfully shooting off the front. Only in the final kilometre do we often see any true fireworks, and then only for the prestige of a stage victory and some pretty modest time gains.
Part of the issue here, however, is that with minimal time trial kilometres in the race, the opportunities to open large time gaps are greatly reduced. This might mean more riders stay, nominally at least, ‘in the race’, however, the incentive for them to go from distance on what should be the race’s most prestigious stages is somewhat diminished.
Mountain top finishes remain the gold standard for TV, which is a big reason why they came to dominate the race until very recently, but for how much longer will they retain that status if all the action is packed into the final kilometre like a sprint stage? If it's any indication of what might be to come, the 2021 route features just three.
WATTS THE PROBLEM?
The individual time trial, by contrast, is undoubtedly the Cinderella of the Tour’s television coverage, appealing to purists and hardcore fans alone. There are no panoramic shots of the mountains for the casual observer, no colourful peloton wheeling past sunflowers and through pretty villages, and nothing that looks like spectacular racing – unless you're acutely aware just how difficult holding over 400 watts for even 20km actually is. But recent advances in coverage have brought massive improvements: even if they are not 100 per cent accurate, live data of approximate time differences and power readings keep things much more interesting, while split screen coverage of the major contenders allows us to be our own judge of how they're going against each other.
“With time trials, we need to know what the difference is between the riders in real time,” argues Lloyd, “what does X need to do to overtake Y on GC, etc. Some organisers already do this, and the graphic at the Tour TT on the penultimate stage last year was great - we had the red/green graphic, and you could hear cycling fans around the world gasp as the colour changed when Tadej Pogacar had gone into the virtual GC lead.”
Despite the enormous final-day transfers recently endured by riders to offer viewers mountain top finishes on the race’s penultimate stage, concluding the action with a time trial has a greater history of delivering drama. Last year’s battle between UAE’s Tadej Pogacar and JumboVisma’s Primož Roglic was the most compelling conclusion to a Tour since Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond did battle on the streets of Paris in a final stage TT in 1989 – the American clawing back the Frenchman’s 50-second advantage over 24.5km to win the race by eight seconds.
“Potentially time trials can make the best TV,” agrees Millar. “I’ve often thought about this: imagine getting the best long-distance runners and setting them off at one-minute intervals for the London Marathon. If I was producing and directing it I could turn it into the most amazing spectacle.”
The argument against time trials also has it that they skew the race in favour of the most powerful riders, and it's true that while the strong GC time triallists have been able to adapt themselves to cope better in the mountains, many climbers still seem allergic to the idea of spending time on the TT bike. Hasn’t the race always been this way, though? One-day races can be won by the strongest rider or the smartest, but Grand Tours have always favoured the former. Audacious tactical moves, such as Alberto Contador’s
Vuelta-winning move on the stage to Fuente Dé in 2012, are rare indeed at any Grand Tour, and even rarer at the Tour where everyone brings their A game and every move is watched.
Rather, history shows us that many of the race’s multiple winners were all riders that built their success on a strong TT game and being good enough (often very good) in the mountains: Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Miguel Induráin, Lance Armstrong before he was written out of history, Chris Froome. Even Alberto Contador was a climber who knew the value of being able to ride against the clock when it mattered – an advantage he always held against chief rival Andy Schleck.
But as the American rider and TT specialist Tejay van Garderen recently said: “People want to see big explosions on climbs. They don’t want to see a defensive-style race.” Comparing cycling to US sports he continued: “You see that in the NFL right now, protecting the quarterbacks, or in the NBA, where defence is almost illegal.”
TIME (TRIAL) OF THEIR LIVES
The twin keys to both exciting time trials, and time trials that can help to make the rest of the race exciting, surely lie in the placement of these efforts in the overall race and their parcours. Last year’s TT course with a kick delivered the kind of explosive action race organiser Christian Prudhomme is so keen to see, and while this year’s TT routes look to be more traditional (read pan flat), their positioning at the start and end of the race should see their impact played out over the full three weeks.
There will be jostling during Brittany’s four Grand Départ stages, and with steep finishes to stages 1 and 2 there will be an opportunity for, say, Julian Alaphilippe to grab yellow and a few early seconds, but stage 5 is where the pack will be shuffled. It’s a chance for the specialists to gain an early advantage in the race, but at just 27.2km ASO has kept the course short enough that any gains should not be so decisive as to close the race down.
Indeed, while other voices are casting doubt on whether last year’s 22-year-old winner can triumph on this course, Pogacar himself is enthused by the route. “The first week
"People want to see big explosions on climbs. They don’t want to see a defensive-style race...” Tejay Van Garderen
in Brittany should be exciting, with the chance of crosswinds and bad weather, and then the time trial on stage 5 should hopefully suit me well,” he said at a UAE team press conference.
The rest of the Tour will then see the contenders playing the cards dealt that day to get themselves into a position to either make race-winning gains – or defend against similarly decisive losses – on stage 20. At 30.8km the route from Libourne to Saint-Émilion is similar in length and terrain to the early TT between Changé and Laval Espace Mayenne, but of course the riders will arrive at the start gate with three weeks and the mountains in their legs.
Last year’s runner-up Rogli was doing recon rides of both TT stages the day after wrapping up victory at the Itzulia Basque Country stage race, clocking up hundreds of kilometres in the car to do so. There is no question that the man who lost last year’s race knows how decisive both stages against the clock are going to be this year. "He’s going to do a lot of training rides on his time trial bike, a minimum of two or three per week, with somebody always with him to correct his position," Jumbo-Visma head of performance Mathieu Heijboer told L’Equipe.
Veteran climber Nairo Quintana, of Arkéa-Samsic, also knows that success in the mountains alone won’t be enough to secure a podium spot in 2021. "We'll have to be as well prepared as we can be for those two TT stages," Quintana told LeTélégramme. "Those stages are going to be as important for the General Classification as the ones in the mountains.”
Rogli ’s Jumbo-Visma teammate Wout van Aert, one of the sport’s hottest young riders, is another to recognise the difference the return of nearly 60 individual TT kilometres to the race is going to make.
In an interview with Wielerflits.nl, Van Aert said: “It is a lot more TT kilometres than last year and I welcome that. Time trialling is part of the Tour, or actually of every Grand Tour, if you assume that it must be won by a rider that is as complete as possible. The fact that the first time trial will be held on the first Wednesday is extra nice.”
If all goes to plan, 2021 could be the year the time trial restates its case for a place at the heart of the Tour de France, and off the back of last year’s stage 20 thriller the cycling audience might now be ready to welcome it back. This year’s route might just have hit upon a sweet spot of TT kilometres – enough to open up the kind of time gaps that encourage attacking riding, but not so many as to wipe out the chances of over half of the competing teams’ GC leaders at the end of week one.
“They'll certainly be influential on the outcome,” agrees Lloyd, “but with the three big favourites for this year (Poga ar, Rogli and Thomas) all strong time triallists, I don’t see there being huge gaps between them, especially as the two tests are relatively short.”
And Millar is quick to point out that, “95-98 per cent of the peloton hate time trials, so for the most part there is an indifference towards where they are staged,” the placement of the TTs during that first week and on the penultimate stage also looks, on paper, to be perfect for setting up a suspensefilled three weeks.
As the old cliché goes, however, it's the riders that make the race. How they choose to approach this year’s route will go a long way to deciding whether these changes are a signpost to the future or an anomaly. Let’s hope we all enjoy whatever they deliver this summer.