Romain Barclet
The sight of Romain Bardet plugging his way up a mountain alone, or in a gruppetto, after being dropped on yet another climb at last year’s Tour de France was a solemn sight; a great hope of French cycling eclipsed by countrymen Julian Alaphillipe and Thibaut Pinot. Bardet finished half an hour down on eventual winner Egan Bernal in 15th, his GC challenge all but over after the first mountain top finish La Planche des Belles Filles on stage 6.
A French cyclist obsessed with the Tour de France, there is nothing unusual in that. However, Bardet has rarely opened his eyes to the world of cycling beyond July. The Tour is a race that he has always prioritised, ahead of everything else, and yet he is in danger of reaching the end of his career with two podiums and a handful of Tour top 10s to his name - he has a win tally of just seven races, three of them being Tour stages.
Bardet’s results at one-day races suggest that he has more to explore in this area - four top 10s at LiègeBastogne-Liège, including a third place, and a fourth place in Il Lombardia suggest monument wins are not far from his grasp. His ride at the 2018 World Championships in Innsbruck, too, earned him second place. Yet all of these races have always felt secondary to the Tour, an afterthought. Bardet’s season often ends in mid-July, and he has only ridden the Vuelta a España once, in 2017, where he ghosted around Spain to 17th on general classification.
The Frenchman’s greatest performances at the Tour, in 2016 and 2017, seem like a long time ago, years where he finished second and third respectively, and seemed to genuinely challenge the Sky hegemony. Time trialling has always been Bardet’s biggest weakness, and regardless of what work he or his team have put into the discipline, he’s haemorrhaged time against the clock every Tour. In 2017, when he and his Ag2r team looked at their strongest, he lost over 2:30 to Froome over the 37km of TTs; he ended up finishing 2:20 behind in Paris. Tour organisers are giving him a helping hand by reducing the number of TT kilometres each year, but he seemed further behind than ever in 2019. Bardet said that winning the King of the Mountains competition last year was a “nice satisfaction”, but can that be true of a man who seemed to be the future of French cycling when he burst on to the scene in 2014, alongside Pinot?
The pressure of the French public, and his very French team, Ag2r, might well be part of the reason why. Maybe it’s time to move on from Le Tour, and concentrate on new objectives, as the plan was this year before the season was suspended - Bardet was planning to follow in the footsteps of Pinot and try and rediscover himself at the Giro d’Italia: Romain 2.0.