How the Tour was won:
Highs and lows took French hopes for a ride
STAGE 3
On a short but very sharp hill in Champagne country, Julian
Alaphilippe rises out of his saddle and puts on the afterburners, leaving behind all challengers. Tongue lolling, he speeds full bore through the vineyards, holding off his pursuers over 16 kilometres to the finish in Épernay, spectators waving glasses of bubbly. As well as the stage victory, the French rider also takes the yellow jersey. His explosive riding, oozing what the French call panache, is the spark that ignites what quickly becomes a Tour of fireworks. On the last uphill climb to the finish line, Egan Bernal finishes five seconds ahead his teammate, defending champion Geraint Thomas, the first hint that the 22-year-old Colombian might be the biggest threat to the Welshman’s campaign for back-to-back titles.
STAGE 8
On a deceptively difficult route as jagged as a wood saw from Beaujolais wine country to the former mining town of Saint-Étienne, Alaphilippe uses the last of the stage’s seven climbs as a launch pad to once again tear away from top contenders, bar one: Thibaut Pinot. The French duo’s race to the finish — where Alaphilippe gets back the yellow jersey he’d lost by just six seconds in Stage 6 — fans the flames of French hopes that the Tour might end with a red-white-and-blue victory in Paris for the first time in 34 years. Thomas crashes, taken out by Canadian Michael Woods on a right-hand bend, but despite quickly remounting can’t catch the long-gone Alaphilippe and Pinot, who finish 20 seconds ahead of him. “This year, any little thing that could go wrong, did go wrong,” Thomas would say at the end.
STAGE 13
Determined to keep his yellow jersey in a power discipline where Geraint Thomas was thought likely to beat him, a sensational Alaphilippe again sends shockwaves through the field by winning the time trial in Pau. He flashes like a greyhound up the punchy final climb, thick with fans hammering thunderously on roadside barriers, and beats Thomas by 14 seconds, making more converts to the idea that Alaphilippe’s race lead (up to 1 minute, 26 seconds) might be big enough to survive through Stage 14, as the highest Tour in history scales the first of seven big mountain ascents to above 2,000 metres in altitude. Bernal struggles on the hilly, bendy time-trial course, losing 1:36 to Alaphilippe and 1:22 to Thomas, in a first big test of the mental fortitude the 22-yearold will need to bounce back and win the Tour.
STAGE 14
On the relentlessly long grind to the Tourmalet pass, with spectacular views across the Pyrenees, Alaphilippe not only doesn’t crack but delivers a one-two punch for France by finishing hot on the wheels of Pinot, first at the top. Pinot’s power up the climb and confident smile on the stage-winner’s podium shows that he is recovering from Stage 10, when he was caught napping, left behind when winds broke up the peloton, and lost a moralesapping 1:40 to Thomas, Bernal and other title contenders. Showing that he is made of stern stuff after his time-trial disappointment and that he’s better than Thomas when the roads go sharply uphill, Bernal
pedals away from his teammate on the Tourmalet. Alaphilippe’s race lead over second-place Thomas grows to 2:02. It would not get any bigger than that.
STAGE 19
The stage where French dreams died. Hobbled by a left thigh muscle tear, Pinot abandons the Tour in tears. Bernal twists the knife by flying away from everyone on the highest climb of the Tour, to the Iseran pass, rising to a lung-burning 2,770 metres above sea level. Bernal, who grew up at altitude in Colombia, looks completely at home in the thinning air. Having erased Alaphilippe’s race lead, Bernal is tearing down the other side to collect the yellow jersey when Mother Nature pours cold water with a violent hailstorm
and landslide that severs the route. The stage is cut short, with riders’ times at the top used to determine overall placings. That puts Bernal in yellow, with a winning margin big enough to carry him to the top of the podium on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.