Tabla de contenidos para September 2019 en Procycling

EDITOR To paraphrase Gary Lineker, the Tour de France is a simple race. 176 cyclists race for three weeks, finish in Paris, and Team Ineos win. Egan Bernal became the fourth rider to win the yellow jersey for the British team, and his triumph, a historic first one for Colombia, was Ineos’s seventh in eight years. It’s an extraordinary run of success. A lot can go wrong at the Tour and Ineos’s ability to eliminate pitfalls is probably their most important asset, arguably more so than having the strongest rider and a formidable team. I’m looking forward to seeing the reaction from Colombia, which is sure to be heartwarming. The country is mad about cycling and they have finally won the Tour, 36 years after their first appearance. For two…

Among all the riders who left the Tour having overachieved on expectations or fulfilled their potential – see Egan Bernal, Julian Alaphilippe, Emanuel Buchmann and Steven Kruijswijk – there were an equal number found wanting in Paris. Riders such as Dan Martin, Romain Bardet, Richie Porte and Nairo Quintana, who lined up in Brussels with the aim of challenging for the win, or at least the podium, ended the race nowhere near it. One bad Tour performance does not end a rider’s career and the multitude of post-Tour debriefs will provide many reasons why some underperformed. But the cold hard facts don’t lie – when the GC battle got going, they were all missing in action. So what now? For Porte and Martin, this year was meant to be their…

Hello from the Swedish summer! It’s been a pretty hot one even up here in the north. I’m currently out in the countryside at my family’s summer cabin, a short drive from the city where I’m from, but the change of scenery is so drastic. Here I’m overlooking a typically small Swedish lake, surrounded by a lot of forest, of which there is more than plenty over here. Since I’m still sidelined from racing with my head injury and things have been pretty low key on the training front, I got to experience what it is like to have a real Swedish summer vacation. So what do we really do in this country apart from celebrating midsummer and eating herring? Lots of my time has been spent out in nature,…

MARTÍN RODRÍGUEZ Martín ‘Cochise’ Rodríguez was the first Colombian to ride the Tour. The 1971 amateur pursuit world champion rode with Felice Gimondi on the Bianchi squad in 1975. LUIS HERRERA ‘Lucho’ captured Colombia’s first Tour stage win on a legendary ascent of Alpe d’Huez in 1984. A year later he won the polka dot jersey – another first for the South American state. FABIO PARRA In 1998, Colombian cycling took another step forward when Parra became the country’s first to finish on the GC podium. Parra finished third behind Pedro Delgado and Steven Rooks. SANTIAGO BOTERO After Colombia’s highs in the 1980s, its riders dropped off the radar a little. Botero reignited interest when he won the polka dot jersey at the height of Armstrong fever in 2000. NAIRO…

High up on the Muur van Geraardsbergen, it’s the same, but different. The famous hillock is painted multi-coloured by hundreds of fans, and techno music is blasting out of enormous speakers at t’ Hemelryck, the bar 50m below the summit of the climb. The photographers are always drawn to the grassy knoll and squat church, whose positions in the frame form a perfect golden ratio - the curve of the road and the negative space of the sky make it look as if the final metres of the Kapelmuur are a cobbled pathway to heaven itself. But the density of fans seems to be thickest, and loudest, down the hill at t’ Hemelryck – the devil has the best tunes, after all. It could be the Tour of Flanders, except…

TUESDAY JULY 9 Reims › Nancy 213.5KM The yellow jersey is usually a vivid presence on the front of the peloton on a flat stage finish with a bunch sprint incoming, although they tend to be there as a safety precaution to avoid any of the chaos that ensues, rather than to get stuck in themselves. In fact, getting stuck into a frantic bunch sprint and all the potential calamities it poses, is exactly what the Tour leader tends to stay well clear of. The last time we saw a yellow jersey lead out a sprinter team-mate inside the final kilometres of a Tour de France bunch finish was back in 2012 when Bradley Wiggins stormed to the front on the Champs-Elysees, to set up Mark Cavendish for the win.…

THURSDAY JULY 11 Mulhouse › La Planche des Belles Filles 160.5KM The new ‘Super Planche’ finish atop La Planche des Belles Filles, an extra kilometre of steep gravel, loomed over the first week of the race. It’s a classic example of the Tour seeking out steeper and more gnarly terrain upon which to test its riders, which Romain Bardet found out to his cost. The Frenchman wrote a new chapter of misery in the recent history of his Tour career when he fluffed his lines on the first really significant climb of the 2019 race. A writer couldn’t ask for a better metaphor for the hapless Frenchman’s disastrous race than the jammed gears which brought him to a tragi-comedic halt just as his front wheel touched the finish line, after…

FRIDAY JULY 12 Belfort › Chalon-sur-Saône 230KM A first-week peloton go-slow has become a fixture of the Tour. A day when teams multilaterally decide to make the running as slow and painless as possible. Sometimes, like in 2017, there’s more than one, as teams capitalise on the chance to take it easy after the crash, bang and wallop of the grand départ. This year the somnolent snooze-fest fell to the longest leg, the 230km slog between Belfort and Chalonsur-Saône. What are the ingredients for a go-slow? A tough stage the previous day? This year the peloton traversed five climbs on the stage to Planche des Belles Filles. What about the chance of a sprint finish? The last 90km to Chalon were across the plains butting up against the Jura Mountains.…

After stage 10 of the Tour, it was 12.30am before Michael Matthews could sleep. He kept playing over the final 200 metres of the day’s sprint into Albi in his head. For the eighth time he had finished in the top 10. Today he was fourth. If he had just started his sprint earlier, he kept thinking, no one else would have got around him and he’d have won. With 400m to go, Matthews was sat comfortably in third wheel. At 350m Cees Bol, his team-mate and Tour debutant, wound up his lead-out. The line was directly in front of them. At 200m Bol was still setting the pace but running out of steam and the bunch was starting to swell around them. By the time his team-mate had dropped…

Lotto Soudal’s Caleb Ewan, the 25-year-old Tour debutant, finished third, third, second and third in the Tour’s first wave of sprints. In a Tour when no one sprinter could impose their will, and wins were decided by the depth of a high profile wheel rim, pressure was building on the youngster from day one. “Tomorrow we will try again,” said Roger Kluge, one of Ewan’s lead-out men with Lotto, after four near misses. The sentence felt well-worn. It rang with frustration - not at Ewan, but that the elusive scintilla of favour needed to win this year. “No one would deserve it more than Caleb,” he added. The next day was a sprint into Toulouse. After that, the Pyrenees and two more sprint stages. Time and opportunity were ebbing away. Ewan’s sprint…

WEDNESDAY JULY 17 Albi › Toulouse 167KM If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again, so the motto goes. Caleb Ewan must have been living by it. Over the last couple of years, near misses have outnumbered wins for the diminutive Australian sprinter. Just this year, prior to the stage finish in Toulouse, he had 15 seconds and thirds compared to six wins. Maybe the fact that none of his rivals were dominant at the Tour was a solace, as perhaps was the fact defeats were measured in bike throws rather than bike lengths. By Toulouse, Ewan had given up on a formal lead-out train - a move that left a couple of his team-mates wondering what useful service they could provide - and opted instead to surf…

THURSDAY JULY 18 Toulouse › Bagnères-de-Bigorre 209.5KM They often say about stages like this that they offer two races - one for the stage, and one for the GC riders. Unfortunately for the television commentators who had to fill the long, almost 10-minute gap between Simon Yates outsprinting Pello Bilbao and Gregor Mühlberger for the stage win and the overall favourites all tapping in, with not the slightest hint of aggression or ambition, the latter group didn’t get the memo. This first Pyrenean stage was a tricky one to judge. Compared to the Alpine stages waiting a week hence, and even to the two big Pyrenean stages following the next day’s time trial, it was a straightforward one. The Col de Peyresourde and Hourquette d’Ancizan, firstcategory climbs both, couldn’t shake…

FRIDAY JULY 26 Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne › Tignes 89KM* TS Eliot might have written it thus: ‘This is the way the defence of the yellow jersey ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.’ It wasn’t Julian Alaphilippe’s fault that his attempt to hold on to the yellow jersey disappeared, along with part of the road on the descent of the Col de l’Iseran, in an unexpected landslide, triggered by the summer storms that hit the northern Alps. The Frenchman had been definitively distanced on the climb by Geraint Thomas, Steven Kruijswijk and Emanuel Buchmann, who in turn had been definitively distanced by Egan Bernal. But while he’d conceded two minutes to the Colombian at the top, he was in the process of carving back at least some of that time…

SUNDAY JULY 28 Rambouillet › Paris Champs-Élysées 128KM The author Honoré de Balzac once wrote: “Whoever does not visit Paris regularly will never really be elegant.” It’s advice that the Tour has taken to its heart. Every year since the first edition in 1903, the race has finished in the French capital, and just in case the TV pictures were not elegant enough already, ASO sent the riders through the Musée du Louvre this year. Caleb Ewan showed that he is an artist of sprinting by sweeping past Dylan Groenewegen to win the stage, his third of 2019, while Egan Bernal celebrated a masterpiece of an overall win. It was only Bernal’s first Tour win, but observers were united in thinking that it wouldn’t be the 22-year-old’s last.…

2021 The year Giulio Ciccone’s contract was extended to by Trek-Segafredo, less than a day after he took the yellow jersey at the Tour de France. The Italian only stepped up to the WorldTour this season, but won a stage and the KoM jersey at the Giro d’Italia, too. “The crash has had a bigger impact than I initially thought.” Wout Van Aert faces a slow recovery from the deep cut to his right leg, suffered after he crashed out of the Tour in the stage 13 time trial. Health Mate will cease sponsoring its eponymous women’s squad this season, after the UCI's ethics team opened an investigation into allegations of abuse of riders by manager Patrick Van Gansen. Ten riders have now come forward to allege abuse took place…

I expected to wake up the day after the Tour in a bad way, but maybe not this bad. After ripping around the streets of Paris with a lot to celebrate, I think it would be hard to judge us for having a beer or seven. I felt that I’d been fighting something the last few days, and about two hours after crossing the line, it became clear that my body was enduring a humiliating defeat. I broke out in a massive fever and now, as I navigate my way back to Girona to suffer in peace, it has me hating any form of light, noise and human under the age of 10. I feel a bit ripped off. I was prepared to be in a bad way, but I…

The inevitable consensus that formed around Bernal, a Tour winner at 22, is that he will be a fixture of the Tour’s future. Race director Christian Prudhomme was moved to say Bernal was a Federer in need of a Nadal. Evidence to contradict the orthodox view is thin on the ground but there historic examples worth heeding: Jan Ullrich, a Tour winner at 23 and a runner-up thereafter; Felice Gimondi won the Tour in his first professional season and though he won lots elsewhere, never became a repeat winner of the grand boucle; More recently Nairo Quintana was destined for Tour domination after finishing runner-up in 2013, but has also not made the top step. However Bernal’s Spanish coach Xabier Artetxe said: “We know he is still young and we…

SATURDAY JULY 9 Bruxelles › Brussel 213.5KM Belgium is a country founded on ambiguity, compromise and harmony between factions, which makes it the precise opposite of a Tour de France bunch sprint. There was little in the way of international co-operation in stage 1 of the 2019 Tour, a loop west and south from Brussels deep into Tour of Flanders country. Greg Van Avermaet had struck a blow for Flemish pride by parlaying his classics chops into ensuring he would be the first over the Muur van Geraardsbergen and Bosberg climbs, borrowed for the day from the Tour of Flanders. These were Flemish climbs for Flemish riders, cheered on by Flemish fans. But when the peloton approached Brussels, it was every team for themselves. Favourite Dylan Groenewegen crashed, and the…

IN ASSOCIATION WITH After the old man presented Julian Alaphilippe with the yellow jersey, his third, in Colmar, the crowd cheered. We weren’t yet in the full throes of Louloumania; at that point, as many people thought he would lose the race lead the next day at La Planche des Belles Filles as didn’t. But something was stirring in the home nation: sure, Alaphilippe was French, winning stages and leading the Tour, but the more exciting thing was the way he was doing it. He’d been riding with panache and entertaining the public. The son of a musician, Alaphilippe is well aware that his style of winning races is as much performance in the presentational sense of the word as in the scientific. As he received the applause and cheers,…

SATURDAY JULY 13 Mâcon › Saint-Étienne 200KM Aside from finishing third in the 2012 Giro – actually, just how did he do that? – Thomas De Gendt’s USP has always been as a baroudeur. As a young buck in Topsport Vlaanderen and Vacansoleil colours, his irrepressible aggression earned him few friends. He’d go on the attack to a volley of verbal abuse from a bunch of seniors wanting a quiet day. He’d say he was motivated to make sure his break stuck as long as possible to keep abuse to a minimum. Now he’s a veteran himself. He has numerous successes under his belt and De Gendt’s attacks are now met with awe and respect from his peers. André Greipel, a former team-mate, went out of his way to congratulate…

SUNDAY JULY 14 Saint-Étienne › Brioude 170.5KM Breakaway hopefuls would have lingered over the profile of stage 9 between Saint-Étienne and Brioude. Given this was over invariably hilly Massif Central terrain, the GC teams would want a benign group of attackers to fight it out. Competition to get in the break was fierce. The draggy uncategorised climb to the village of Chambles ensured the calibre of the 15 riders who did work free couldn’t be faulted. It was a mix of habitual escapees and strong team players on day release, such as Oliver Naesen, Marc Soler and the eventual winner, Daryl Impey. Impey’s team, Mitchelton-Scott, had earmarked this stage for the South African workhorse or the Italian stallion Matteo Trentin. Julian Dean, the team’s Kiwi DS, explained there was little…

Caleb Ewan’s stage win was the feel-good story of the race. Six weeks before the Tour started, his baby daughter Lily was born prematurely at home in Monaco. He had to travel to the race before Lily was allowed out of hospital. “It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do: come to a race and leave my daughter in hospital and I’m just so happy that I could repay my new family with such a big thing,” he said after his win in Toulouse. His wife Ryann and Lily flew in for the rest day in Nîmes and were there to greet Ewan as he took his second stage win. “When my daughter’s old enough it’s going to be pretty cool to tell her that the first ever…

FRIDAY JULY 19 Pau › Pau 27.2KM ITT Despite the high ceiling and the fact that the conference room was big enough to fit endless rows of tables, the gasp of shock still reverberated around Pau’s Palais Beaumont as Julian Alaphilippe crossed the finish line and skidded - literally - to a halt after the time trial. Some people even broke into applause. Decked head to toe in yellow, with a slick, cone-shaped aero helmet to match, Alaphilippe then hopped off his bike, bent his knees and stretched his arms out as wide as the smile that took over his face before he embraced the team staff waiting for him. The time trial was certain to be the day that Alaphilippe relinquished his lead at the Tour. The Frenchman had…

SUNDAY 21 JULY Limoux › Foix Prat d’Albis 185.5KM As the Tour approached the foot of Prat d’Albis the heavens opened. For two weeks the rain had entirely held off, but now as the final climb of the Pyrenees approached, a fierce downpour struck. The town of Foix at the bottom was drenched, while low cloud and mist shrouded its peak in mystery. What would happen up there was anyone’s guess. With the GC riders taking control on the Tourmalet the day before, a large 36-rider breakaway was let loose to contest the win. Simon Yates expertly bided his time over the first three climbs of the day, as the group gradually slimmed down. When Simon Geschke went off ahead on the Mur de Péguère, Yates bridged across, used his…

MAX BULLA Bulla was the pioneer of Austrian cyclists, winning three Tour stages and two Vuelta stages in the 1930s. In 1931, he became the only Austrian ever to have worn the Tour’s yellow jersey. ADOLF CHRISTIAN Christian turned pro in 1957 for Fausto Coppi’s Carpano team. That year, aged 23, he made his debut at the Tour and finished third overall, riding for the Swiss national team. PETER LUTTENBERGER Luttenberger burst on to the scene by coming fifth in the Tour in 1996 aged 23. He followed up with two 13th places in France, in 1997 and 2003, but finished his career as a climbing domestique. GEORG TOTSCHNIG Totschnig achieved three top 10s at the Giro, one at the Tour and one the Vuelta, with fifth in the 2003…

TIRRENO-ADRIATICO The Welshman’s spring is disrupted when he pulls out of the race of the two seas with a stomach upset on stage 4. TOUR OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY Team-mates Thomas, Micha? Kwiatkowski and Jonathan Castroviejo come down in a late crash on stage 3. TOUR DE SUISSE The Welshman’s most serious setback comes when he crashes on stage 4 and sustains a cut above his eye. TOUR DE FRANCE STAGE 1 Inside 3km to go, he crashes as teams ready for the bunch sprint. “I was pretty slow by the time I hit them,” he said. TOUR DE FRANCE STAGE 8 Three kilometres from the foot of the final climb, Thomas is brought down when EF Drapac’s Michael Woods falls on a corner. TOUR DE FRANCE STAGE 16 On…

After finishing eighth at the Giro d’Italia, Simon Yates returned to racing at the 2019 Tour de France in support of his twin brother and Mitchelton-Scott team-mate, Adam, who was riding for the general classification. While Adam’s race faded in the Pyrenees, Simon won two of the team’s four stages aboard the all-new Scott Addict RC - an update to the model, which, when it was first released in 2007, was one of the lightest production framesets on the market. And while low weight remains a vital metric, the Addict RC now majors on aerodynamics and integration. The key design development is the bike’s success at routing shifting cables and hydraulic brake hoses through the one-piece Syncros bar and stem and into recesses in the headtube, which is a clever…

Tour de France. Second time I’ve ridden it, but first time I’ve finished. Xavier, one of our performance directors, asked me if they gave me my licence at the finish. I looked at him confused and he replied, “Well now you’re a proper pro, getting through the Tour.” It’s the stress of it all compared with other grand tours, that can wear you down, and the fact that everything seems to be 2kph faster than any other race. Everyone is good; no one is there for free. The sprint finishes and leadouts were my calling and it was a lot safer than I had expected, partly because of the sheer pace. I think partly also because of the calibre of riders. Seeing Paris was a feeling I’ll never forget. The…

SUNDAY JULY 7 Bruxelles Palais Royal › Brussel Atomium 27.6KM The World’s Fair is a regular exhibition which moves around the world and is intended to showcase the very best of technology and the achievement of nations. It is, in other words, not so different from a bike race. Stage 2 of the 2019 Tour took the riders on a grand tour of the more salubrious and leafy suburbs of Brussels before heading to the north of the city, ending under the gleaming stainless steel edifice of the Atomium. The Atomium was the centrepiece of the 1958 World’s Fair, which was held in Brussels. Built in the shape of an iron crystal of nine atoms, it was intended to symbolise modernity, belief in science and faith in the future (though…

MONDAY JULY 8 Binche › Épernay 215KM German scientists once found that a champagne cork leaves a vigorously shaken bottle at approximately 40 kilometres per hour, which is about how fast Julian Alaphilippe must have been riding when he left the peloton behind on the Côte de Mutigny, 16km from the end of stage 3, between Binche and Épernay. (What else could the average gradient of the climb out of Mutigny be, but 12.2 per cent, exactly the same as champagne?) There was plenty of the bubbly stuff being consumed when the Tour crossed the vineyards of the Marne and proceeded, via Épernay’s Avenue de Champagne to the finish line above. Alaphilippe’s effervescent attack, followed by 16km of exhilarating resistance, gave the home fans reason to celebrate: a first stage…

WEDNESDAY JULY 10 Saint-Dié-des-Vosges › Colmar 175.5KM Too flat to be a mountain stage, too mountainous to be a flat stage, the fifth day of the 2019 Tour couldn’t have been better designed for the new breed of sprinter-climbers who have dominated the classics and these kinds of stages in the grand tours in recent years. Of course, the king of the sprinter-climbers is Peter Sagan, and he duly won the stage, after the peloton was whittled down to about half its original size by the two second-category climbs of the day. A good selection of other sprinter-climbers - Wout Van Aert, Matteo Trentin, Sonny Colbrelli and Michael Matthews (plus race leader Julian Alaphilippe, who invented a new category for himself at this Tour, the sprinter-climber-time triallist) filled the top…

STAGE 3 Julian Alaphilippe, Épernay Distance to finish: 16km Alaphilippe used the 12.2 per cent slopes of the Côte de Mutigny to escape at the moment the early break was neutralised. He won by 26 seconds and took the yellow jersey. STAGE 6 Dylan Teuns, Super Planche Distance to finish: 160km An 11-man escape took off shortly after the start in Mulhouse. Dylan Teuns and Giulio Ciccone outlasted the break and kept a minute’s lead over the GC. Teuns won the stage. STAGE 8 Thomas De Gendt, Saint-Étienne Distance to finish: 200km The Belgian dragged a strong quartet free after leaving Mâcon. De Gendt went solo over the final climb 12km from the line with 1:30 and stayed away to take a memorable win. STAGE 8 Alaphilippe & Pinot, Saint-Etienne…

MONDAY JULY 15 Saint-Flour › Albi 217.5KM France loves a roundabout. There are more than 30,000 in the country – more than half the world’s total. So you’d think French riders would have an inbuilt knack of negotiating the quickest way through them. Yet Groupama-FDJ’s Thibaut Pinot was a bad casualty when the peloton’s arrowhead formation was disrupted by a big traffic circle in crosswinds around 30km north of Albi. When Ineos went the long – i.e. wrong – way around the circle and took a handful of GC riders with them, the British team had the strength and cohesiveness to correct the mistake immediately. As they hit the front en masse, they joined forces with echelon specialists Deceunick-Quick Step, and in the space of a French TV ad break,…

welve seconds was all it took Marianne Vos to sprint up the 100m-long slope of Rue Mulot, the crucial climb that came within the final kilometre of this year’s La Course in Pau. The Rue Mulot peaks at 17 per cent gradient, and from the top, there were still 350 metres to the finish: a right turn, then a left onto the finishing straight on Rue du Maquis, but those final metres became almost irrelevant. That 12-second effort had already won Vos the race. Everyone expected Vos to to win La Course. The climb was classic Vos territory - short, steep and designed exactly for a punchy, explosive sprinter like her. The Dutchwoman was also in blistering form and came into the fifth edition of the race having taken four…

SATURDAY JULY 20 Tarbes › Tourmalet Barèges 117.5KM How much action can a top bike race pack into 117km? If its the Col du Soulor followed by the Tourmalet - 19km at 7.4 per cent - it turns out it can be quite a lot. On the Soulor Romain Bardet was dropped like a dead donkey and he finished 20 minutes down. Adam Yates was also dropped here, though he made it back into the yellow jersey group for a time. On the lower slopes of the Tourmalet Dan Martin was cut adrift as Movistar set a fierce pace on the front of the yellow jersey group. That backfired spectacularly when the main victim turned out to Nairo Quintana. If that was the list of men who left through the…

TUESDAY JULY 23 Nîmes › Nîmes 217KM The heat of France’s Midi, an aggressive, hard-edged burn that parched throats and made Tour followers feel like they were being slowly baked, had settled over Nîmes. It provoked lethargy – the faintest breath of wind from the south was enough to fan the heat and make it worse, but not enough to split the bunch. Or maybe it was the unusual format of the stage – both a start and a finish in Nîmes, rather than the normal A to B plotted by the organisers. One of the best psychological ploys of dealing with the overwhelming length of the Tour de France is to break it down into sections, but in the evening the riders were no closer, physically, to Paris than…

WEDNESDAY JULY 24 Pont du Gard › Gap 200KM Dissecting large breaks successfully in the last week of the Tour is more of an art than a science and that makes Matteo Trentin’s win in Gap a capolavoro, a masterpiece. As the race headed to the Alps, 33 riders escaped when the flag dropped. It included luminaries such as Kasper Asgreen, Magnus Cort, Michael Schär and Schär’s teammate, Greg Van Avermaet. Total Direct Energie and Arkéa Samsic, teams for whom such breaks should be bread and butter, missed the split and were ordered to mount a humiliating chase at the front of the peloton. When their punishment ended, the gap grew to 20 minutes. Trentin, on a counterattack to a move by Nils Politt, produced a group of 10 strong…

THURSDAY JULY 25 Embrun › Valloire 208KM This was it: the big one. Embrun to Valloire traversed the Vars, Izoard and Galibier. That’s a trio of 2,000m-plus whoppers that made stage 18 the queen stage. After Pyrenean fireworks, hopes were high that riders would pick up where they left off. They did not. Well, not immediately. Thirty-three riders got clear on the Côte des Demoiselles Coiffées including big names whose GC hopes had perished in the Pyrenees or earlier. Among them were Nairo Quintana, Adam Yates and Romain Bardet. While the stage was long at 208km, it didn’t spring to life until the Galibier. Then everything happened at once. Bardet attacked the lead group, which provoked the winning counter from Quintana. And now action was afoot in the yellow jersey…

SATURDAY JULY 27 Albertville › Val Thorens 59.5KM* Early surveyors exploring the Alps made mention of Mont Iseran, a 4,000m-high peak in the Vanoise. It was only in the 19th century, when the region was mapped properly, that people realised that no such peak existed. It’s not easy to lose a mountain, but the Tour de France managed the same feat on stage 20 of the 2019 event to Val Thorens. Landslides on the Cormet de Roselend forced the organisers to excise that climb, plus one more, from the route, and turned a complicated final Alpine challenge into a straightforward (though leg-stinging) climb up to Val Thorens. Anybody plotting to ambush the new race leader, Egan Bernal, had suddenly lost most of the territory upon which they could do so.…