“BREAKFAST, BUS, RACE, BUS, HOTEL, MASSAGE, EAT. SLEEP, REPEAT”

This is my seventh Tour, my 16th grand tour, and what’s hitting me particularly hard at the end of this particular race isn’t day-today tiredness. It’s mental fatigue, starting with the exhaustion you feel when you’ve seen it all before. Unless a team has something special to celebrate like a stage win - and this year very few have, and we’re not one of them - each day feels exactly the same: breakfast, bus, race, bus, hotel, massage, eat. sleep, repeat. Again and again and again. Then there’s the same pressure of being in the Tour, the same huge level of expectations, the realisation just how important it is for the sponsors and the team. Add the lack of changes in your daily routine and no wins, and the combination of all that is what makes this last part of a race so hard.

Everybody talks about how there are more crashes than ever, too, and it’s going faster each year, how the first week is even more manic than ever. But they do that every July. There’s always 20 riders crashing somewhere, always a leader or two that goes home early. If it happens to you, and I went down on the first day, and again another day, you end up stressed out. But normally, if it doesn’t happen to you, it’s just part of the furniture.

Maybe the key is everything in the Tour, the pleasure and the pains, are always amplified so much by the race’s importance. So in a year when so few teams have won, like this one, the sense of stress you feel in the last week is what makes it so incredibly exhausting.

Tour regular Izagirre suffered through the rain on stage 8, the first mountain visit