Nîmes Nîmes

Following the second rest day, the peloton faces a straightforward flat stage – unless the wind blows

Nîmes has always been a place apart. It’s an old Roman city in the south of France, a formerly protestant enclave in a catholic country. Its Roman remains – the amphitheatre and maison carrée in the city centre, and Pont du Gard aqueduct 20km to the northeast – have drawn visitors ever since tourism became a popular leisure activity here from the 19th century onwards.

It’s also the closest the 2019 Tour will ever come to a respite. Week one of the Tour is always too hectic, chaotic and dangerous for the riders ever to feel like they are catching any break, other than the suicide one up the road. Week two, this year, consists mainly of the Pyrenees and a stressful time trial. While waiting ahead of the racers after today until Paris is a crescendo of Alpine mountain stages.

But the Nîmes stage is different. It starts and finishes in the same place, so the logistical disruption to everyone is minimal, and there is a single category-four climb on the route. By now, the sprinting hierarchy will be established (and the chances are some sprinters may not even have survived the Pyrenees). It means that this will probably be the quietest stage of the entire race. The

GC contenders will anxiously check the weather forecast for wind, just in case they need to be on the lookout for crosswinds, but Nîmes is sheltered by the Cevennes and Ardèche plateau to the west and north, so is less exposed to the Mistral than the eastern side of the Rhône valley. It’s worth noting that in 2008, wind at the finish nearly thwarted Mark Cavendish’s winning sprint, while in 2014, the breakaway came agonisingly close to outfoxing the sprinters’ teams chasing behind.

Maybe all of that makes this a dangerous stage. The Romans who lived here in the first few hundred years AD thought that the easy life would go on forever, and succumbed to decadence and the Visigoth invasion of the 400s and 500s. Complacency has a habit of disrupting the best laid plans.