Table of contents for November 2020 in Procycling

EDITOR Well, we got there. A Tour de France which we thought might not even happen got all the way to Paris. Not only that, but it was a cracker. Eventually. I’m fascinated by what makes a good race. My preference is for unpredictability, emotional engagement and open racing, which meant that I found the first 19 days absorbing, like a good Test Match, rather than exhilarating. Jumbo-Visma were going to close the race down, in the style of Sky/Ineos, and I thought Primož Roglic was imperious. The Jumbo modus operandi didn’t have me jumping out of my armchair, but there were some interesting sub-plots. For example: stage 7, which started with Bora duffing up Sam Bennett and Deceuninck, and ended with Ineos and Jumbo putting Tadej Pogacar out of…

I grew up in a very small town in Belarus, where I did artistic gymnastics for four years. Our coach left to go to another bigger city and in my town there wasn’t another coach who could train me. After that, I went to athletics and was a runner for a year and a half. One day I won a little town competition, and I met a cycling coach. He asked me if I’d like to come and try and ride a bike. In June 2001, I was 12, I went to the cycling school; it was the first time I’d tried cycling and I’ve been doing it ever since that day. We had regional competitions and county competitions - not national championships but those for young children - and…

I’m satisfied and the team is satisfied with the Tour de France. We had a goal to win a stage; it was pretty simple. And we won two stages. I don’t have anything where I can say it could have been better. Maybe the last day in Paris, but there are days where we lose or we can’t win - someone else is faster or things didn’t work out in the final as we wanted. It was a little bit disappointing to leave without that win, especially as last year Caleb won on the Champs-Élysées - that’s the best feeling going home from a race. But as soon as we remember the two stage wins, when some teams didn’t get any, we are happy. It was a good Tour. We…

The warm glow of a mid-September evening in Paris illuminated the final actions of the 2020 Tour de France. In July, the sun sets behind the Arc du Triomphe, its last rays pointing straight through and south east down the Champs-Élysées, but this late in the year the sunset is due west. It cast an unusual light on an unusual Tour, with the podium backlit from a different angle. Everything was a little different at this year’s Tour - the riders had started in Nice, raced 21 stages and reached Paris as planned, but the shadow of covid that loomed over the race and threatened to stop it in its tracks was given expression in the sharp light and long penumbra of the autumnal afternoons through which the peloton raced.…

One of the last things I do before setting off from home in the French Pyrenees for the grand départ in Nice is to give my forecast for the Tour de France to a website I work for. Top three? Dumoulin, Bernal, Roglic. Chances of the race reaching Paris? Eighty per cent. I check the predictions made by the other journalists. No one else thinks the Tour has better than a 50-50 chance of reaching its scheduled finale in the French capital. I put my comparative optimism down to living in France and witnessing first-hand the government’s very effective, if slightly late response to the threat of covid-19 by locking down the whole country for several weeks. However, when I stopped for a lunch break just to the east of…

SUNDAY AUGUST 30 Nice Haut Pays › Nice 186KM The Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, its domed pavilion designed in the 1870s by Gustave Eiffel, sits near the summit of the Col des Quatres Chemins, east of Nice. In its day, it had the world’s largest refracting telescope. You didn’t need the observatory’s ‘grande lunette’ to see that Julian Alaphilippe was going to attack on the slopes of the col, just before the descent into Nice. After a fairly neutral day in the higher mountains to the north, the stage would be decided among the hilltop settlements - the villages perchés - linked by the corniche roads, climbs and descents. Alaphilippe territory, in other words. The Frenchman’s team-mate Bob Jungels set the pace on the climb, then Alaphilippe attacked, just…

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 1 Sisteron › Orcières-Merlette 160.5KM A day after the sprint trains led the peloton into the finish in Sisteron, it was time for the GC teams to apply similar tactics in the first mountaintop finish of the 2020 Tour. The expectations before the Tour were that Jumbo-Visma would be the most likely team to control things, and they eagerly took that responsibility on the road to Orcieres-Merlette, wielding sledgehammer strength. In a 6.7km-long lead-out worthy of any track team sprint, Jumbo’s climbing domestiques were burned through before their leader Primož Roglič emerged at the front and duly sprinted to the stage win. Just as Sky and then Ineos have in the past, the Dutch team had what looks like the strongest team in the race, and apparently the…

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 2 Gap › Privas 183KM As an exercise in cycling philosophy, consider: the break. René Descartes might have reflected, if he were to create a discourse on the method of road racing, evadere ergo sum. I escape, therefore I am. Perhaps Plato might have deduced that the perfect form of a bike race consists of a break, a chase, a catch and a sprint. Jean-Paul Sartre would surely have posited that bike racers are condemned to be free. The break is so fundamental a part of bike racing that we have taken it for granted. However, the 2020 Tour peloton collectively examined the nature of things and came to a decision that stage 5, from Gap to Privas, would proceed with no break. The long day of absolutely…

THERE have been quite a few times when I’ve managed to sneak into breaks, but on the other hand there have definitely been days when I don’t make it, even though I want to. There’s always a little bit of a balancing act. It’s not just luck, or legs, it’s a combination of those two things. It’s luck, and timing, experience, and legs as well. Stage 8 we started on pretty small roads, and that’s something you’ve got to take into account, because the smaller the roads, the easier it is for other teams to block the road. It didn’t take too long for the break to form, because after a few attacks we had a little group with a few riders, and a gap to the peloton. We all…

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 5 Cazeres › Loudenvielle 141KM The winner of the first Pyrenean stage, Nans Peters, was named after a children’s literature character, Nans the Shepherd. However, before the television cameras could focus on his win in Loudenvielle, they lingered for perhaps longer than was comfortable over another lover of even-toed ungulates, Thibaut Pinot, the most famous keeper of goats in the peloton, who was unable to keep pace on the Port de Bales. The saying goes that all publicity is good publicity, and the Groupama insurance company and the French national lottery certainly got a lot of television time as Pinot laboured up the climb, but the growing distance between the Frenchman and the front of the race indicated that the long wait for a home Tour de France…

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 9 Châtelaillon-Plage › Poitiers 166.5KM The calm usually comes before the storm, not after, but following a stage where wind and road furniture wreaked havoc on the flattest day of the Tour this year, stage 11 was clearly a chance for the peloton to reset the batteries, or at least not make anything more difficult than it needed to be. The 167.5km route inland east to Poitiers was as straightforward a stage as the Tour had this year - so much so, it wasn’t until after the finish that the main drama kicked off. It featured a flat 90km to the one cat-4 climb slap-bang in the middle, before a flat runin to the line. With this the last real flat stage before Paris, the sprinters’ teams naturally…

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 10 Chauvigny › Sarran 218KM If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, only subtly differently. Marc Hirschi won his first Tour stage in Sarran, following two podium places. He tried a late escape with a break on stage 2, and a long, lone break on stage 9. This time he combined the best points of these two methods - he joined a break, then attacked alone from it over the Suc au May, and rode hard over the rolling terrain of the Massif Central. The young Swiss rider is mentored and managed by Fabian Cancellara, who might have told him a thing or two about attacking and holding off a chase. However, this was no solo effort - it was built on teamwork. Sunweb came to…

Nothing transfigures a rider like defeat. For three weeks, Primož Roglic had looked a fitting winner of a socially-distanced Tour de France. Cautious in his tactics, guarded in his comments and safely shielded by the strongest team in the race, he kept everybody at arm’s length. Then, in the space of 36.2 kilometres of hard road in the Haute-Saône, all changed utterly. On the Tour’s penultimate day, the detached impregnability of the champion suddenly gave way to the vulnerability of the human. Nothing marked that transition quite like the new helmet that was perched atop Roglic’s head during the fateful final time trial. As he readied himself on the start ramp in Lure, eyes hidden behind a tinted visor, the headwear seemed like the latest demonstration of his Jumbo-Visma team’s…

When the 2020 Tour came to Lyon, race historians noted that the visit, a rare one these days, was a nod to the Tour’s first edition. The inaugural stage of the inaugural Tour ended in the city, and Søren Kragh Andersen’s 15-second margin of victory in the 2020 iteration wasn’t too different from Maurice Garin’s 55-second gap ahead of Émile Pagie 117 years before. (With only one other rider within an hour of Garin, however, things were a little more spread out in 1903.) The Tour wears its history self-consciously. Every edition is presented as a new chapter in the race’s story, but at the same time the organisers are aware of the historical resonance of its people and its places. Until his death last year, 1960s Tour star Raymond…

I’ve found out, like everyone said, the Tour de France is nothing like any other race, you cannot compare it to anything done before. The peloton is really, really big, you can feel that it’s the Tour de France and everyone wants to achieve something. Mostly, I’m having a lot of fun - it’s my childhood dream to race this race and I’m really happy that I am doing it. I’m trying to pay attention to live in those moments, and I’m really having fun. It’s a huge honour to be the first Israeli rider in the Tour. I really like to represent my country and to show the world the other side of Israel, the side that normally doesn’t get to be in the media. It’s really a great…

As the cameras focus on the front of the race - the leaders, the glamour of attacks - it is easy to forget about the battle at the back of the field to remain in contention. The Tour television production team love their ‘arrière-du-peloton’ camera shots, but what we never see is what happens to the riders after they have been dropped. While those in the hunt for the top of the general classification are looking to gain seconds, those who have slipped back on the stage are just hoping to finish inside the time limit. The time cut is set each day based on the difficulty of the stage and the speed of the peloton on that day, and then a percentage is calculated, and from that, a time…

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 20 Mantes-la-Jolie › Paris 122KM In the last 30 years only three riders have won on the Champs-Élysées wearing the green jersey: Djamolidine Abdoujaparov in 1993, Robbie McEwen in 2002 and Mark Cavendish in 2011. Not even Sean Kelly, the only other Irishman to ever win green at the Tour, had ever achieved the feat. Quick Step hadn’t won in Paris since Gert Steegmans in 2008. The exclusive club expanded by one member in 2020 as Sam Bennett rode a wave of confidence and momentum to the victory on the Champs, ahead of Mads Pedersen, in the rainbow jersey, and Peter Sagan, for once divested of green. STAGE RESULT GENERAL CLASSIFICATION POINTS CLASSIFICATION KOM CLASSIFICATION YOUTH CLASSIFICATION TEAMS CLASSIFICATION…

Oh man, what a change in momentum we saw in this year’s Tour de France. While I was watching the time trial on La Planche des Belles Filles I got more and more excited. I could not believe what I saw and my thoughts went back all the way to 1989, when fan favourite Greg LeMond beat ponytailed Laurent Fignon by eight seconds. I was nine years old then but I still remember my dad screaming in front of our television. Now I was doing the same. History has been written by our two Slovenians. From what I understand in the Dutch media, Jumbo-Visma were very confident of the victory. The general manager said after the last mountain stage, where Primož Roglic put 15 seconds into Tadej Pogacar, that it…

DEPUTY EDITOR What will it take for real action and change to be made to ensure cyclists’ safety in races? Remarkably, the spate of horrendous incidents over the summer don’t seem yet to have been enough. The kind that saw Fabio Jakobsen left in a coma after his high-speed crash at the Tour of Poland. Or Remco Evenepoel with a fractured pelvis and lung contusion after careering into a ravine at Il Lombardia. Or Max Schachmann with a broken collarbone after a car drove onto the course in the finale of the same race. Or a mountain descent at the Criterium du Dauphine that ensured that Primož Roglič, Egan Bernal and Thibaut Pinot all started the Tour de France battered and bruised, that Steven Kruijswijk missed it altogether, and which…

I was a bit busy racing at Settimana Internazionale Coppi e Bartali and Tirreno-Adriatico for most of the Tour de France but I did get to enjoy the last week, from the comfort of my own sofa in my dressing gown all day. And what a finale to the race we had. Looking back now it’s perhaps surprising Pogacar was so overlooked after his monstrous performance at the 2019 Vuelta a España, he also rode an unbelievable stage 20 there, and again he produced an unbelievable performance to snatch the Tour right at the death. It was, of course, incredibly enjoyable to watch Sam [Bennett] finish off the job for green and win on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. For all the teams and sponsors I’m sure it was a huge…

Primož Roglic won’t want to hear it, but Tadej Pogacar didn’t initially want to take part in the Tour de France this year. “I was talking to Tadej when the season was getting underway, and he wasn’t so interested in the Tour,” Joxean Fernández Matxin, UAE Emirates DS, tells Procycling. “He was much keener on doing the Giro this year and then the Tour the next. But I told him the best idea would be to do the Tour now, where with [Fabio] Aru as leader, he’d be able to learn what it’s like without any pressure.” Matxin’s argument about learning without pressure proved far more successful than the veteran Basque director could have imagined, even if Pogacar’s ability to grasp the essential notions of grand tour racing at a…

Rain in Nice is not quite as rare as an autumn Tour de France, but the deluge which soaked the riders of the Tour and lubricated the roads of the Côte d’Azur on the first stage of the 2020 race summed up the atmosphere of incongruity which surrounded the grand départ of the 107th edition. Fourteen months previously, in a different era, the Brussels grand départ kicked off in a heatwave; for 2020, overcast skies washed the colour out of Nice and the Riviera. It was miracle enough that the 2020 Tour, the covid Tour, was taking place at all. Plans of all sorts have been put indefinitely on hold through this year, so for the world’s biggest bike race to be running a mere nine weeks late felt like…

The coronavirus pandemic caused all kinds of havoc in the racing calendar in 2020, especially on the women’s side of the sport and not least to La Course by Le Tour de France. Just seven weeks out from the day of the race the event was amended from a circuit on the Champs-Élysées - where the race has thrice been held before - to a lumpy loop around Nice, on the morning of and on the same roads as stage 1 of the men’s Tour. On a sporting level, the change probably helped the event, though from a publicity viewpoint, an afternoon race in Paris beats a morning race around Nice. It was the latest iteration of an event that in seven years has chopped and changed its identity. It…

Cycling is often described as chess on wheels, and when Adam Yates, Julian Alaphilippe and Marc Hirschi descended headlong into Nice on stage 2, they faced a finely balanced endgame. The trio had conflicting aims. They needed to work together to hold off a fast-closing peloton. But they also needed to be ready to turn on each other in order to win the stage. If co-operation stopped too early, they’d be caught. If they co-operated too long, they’d do nothing more than help one of the other two win the stage. Sprinting in cycling is not like sprinting in athletics. The point of a 100m race is to find the fastest athlete in the field. However, tautologically, the point of a bike race is to find out who wins the…

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 3 Le Teil › Mont Aigoual 191KM They call it an échappée royale: a break consisting only of big riders and hitters. No suicide break, this, and twenty-four hours after a rare breakaway-free stage, there was no shortage of riders who saw stage 6 as low-hanging fruit. Nicolas Roche, who deliberately lost time the day before - also keen to finally land a debut stage win after a string of top 10s in years gone by - got things going, and was followed by an A-list septet of Rémi Cavagna, Greg Van Avermaet, Jesús Herrada, Alexey Lutsenko, Neilson Powless, Edvald Boasson Hagen and Daniel Oss. The combination of wise veterans and eager rookies, desperate to win a stage and eager to prove their worth, mixing climbers and diesel…

THE break depends on what race it is and what your tactics are. Sometimes you’re not looking to get in any breakaway, you’re looking to shut them down or limit the size, for a tactic you want to play later in the day. We go into a race identifying stages that have potential for that, but that might change on the run, depending on what position you are on the GC, or whether you have a sprinter. When Adam [Yates] was in yellow, there was a limit on which guys we’d let go. We encourage our guys to look at results, so they know the rider, the team that we’re looking to block. In the prerace meeting we present that to them and then our guys are very good at…

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 6 Pau › Laruns 153KM It must be heartbreaking to get so close to a first stage win at the Tour, only to be pipped at the line. All the more heartbreaking when it is your second podium placing of the race so far, and you have been on your own at the front for 80km as Marc Hirschi had been. The exuberance of youth was the story of the day, as Hirschi attacked on his own from the early breakaway, holding off a charge from the GC leaders for most of the finale. When he crested the Col de Marie Blanque he had just 20 seconds on his chasers, and his descending skills kept him in the hunt, as he dived around corners, using every inch of…

The most transcendental hour of the 2020 Tour de France came in the final 26km of stage 9, between the base of the Col de Marie-Blanque and the finish in Laruns. At the bottom of the Marie-Blanque, Sunweb’s Marc Hirschi was on his own, 3:30 ahead of the reduced peloton80:175, led by a line of Jumbo-Visma riders. The odds at this point in the race were against the Swiss. He’d been on his own since a short way into the Col de la Hourcère, 65km earlier, when he attacked a small group of riders who in turn were barely clear of the peloton, and he’d spent the interim time alone. The laws of physics do not favour lone riders against a peloton. The laws of physics furthermore do not favour…

1 Dani Martínez wins on Puy Mary That was typical Dani. He pops up some days and does phenomenal rides. We didn’t really expect it from him that day because he’d been a little bit down after his crash. That day, on the first climb coming out of Clermont Ferrand I saw Dani pop out of the bunch at the speed of a motorbike, going past big groups. Then he and Hugh Carthy got into the move and we had the guys we knew could win the stage. When he was chasing Max Schachmann, at the base of the final climb, Lennard Kämna tried attacking, but Dani closed it so easily that, in the car, even then, we knew we’d won. We knew we were going to catch Schachmann on…

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 11 Châtel-Guyon › Pas de Peyrol 191.5KM The Monts du Cantal, of which the Puy Mary is one of the most prominent peaks, are what remains of a single huge volcano, which last erupted two million years ago. The Puy Mary and its surrounding peaks were carved out of the landscape by the inexorable crushing action of glaciers during the last Ice Age. The GC action up to and including stage 13 of the 2020 Tour, which finished on the Pas de Peyrol, just below the Puy Mary’s peak, was more akin to the slow-moving glacial flow that formed this landscape than the Strombolian eruptions that characterised the volcano’s initial formation. Before the stage, the top 10 were separated by 1:42; after the hard grind to the top,…

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 12 Clermond Ferrand › Lyon 194KM Coming to the Tour de France with neither an established sprinter or an established GC rider can be a gamble. But it can also give a team space in which to operate. It was an especially big gamble in the case of Sunweb, who left home their most successful Tour rider in former green jersey winner Michael Matthews in favour of a youthful line up. The biggest wins often come through taking the biggest chances, however… With Bora-Hansgrohe having worked hard early in the stage to distance green jersey Sam Bennett, the team were desperate to set up Peter Sagan for the win to take maximum points but had burned a lot of their matches already. For Sunweb, not having one leader…

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 15 La Tour-du-Pin › Villard-de-Lans 164KM You only needed to look at the size of the break that went away early on stage 16 to see that the final week of the Tour had started. Week three is the last chance saloon, as alongside the battle for the yellow jersey is a battle of another kind among teams trying to salvage their Tour before it’s too late. With the 15 stage victories so far having been shared between just nine teams, and with the four jerseys sat within those same teams, too, that left 13 squads with little to show for their efforts. That would explain why it took 60km before the breakaway proper went free, and why it contained 23 riders, to make it the biggest in…

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 17 Méribel › La Roche-sur-Foron 175KM How do you salvage a grand tour? Get two riders up the road, win a stage with one, and move the other into the KoM jersey, obviously. Micha? Kwiatkowski and Richard Carapaz of Ineos Grenadiers crossed the line arm in arm, and were so far ahead that they could enjoy a steady ride in and a chat, after having infiltrated the 19-rider break and then dispatched their rivals one by one. Kwiatkowski paid tribute to the team’s late sports director, Nicolas Portal, and there was a sense that Ineos needed to put on a performance in his memory, but also to rescue a Tour that risked ending with nothing. With Egan Bernal’s abandon, there was a sense that Ineos would look rudderless.…

Even when Sam Bennett was interviewed after stage 10, it still hadn’t sunk in that he had won his first Tour stage. “I forgot to throw the bike at the line and I thought he might have got me,” the Irishman said, almost to himself, in a panic as if someone was going to come in and take it away. He’d gone through the same routine with his team-mates a few minutes earlier. “Did I get it?” he asked. “Yeah, but did I really win it? It was so close I don’t trust it,” he repeated, in between hugs of congratulation. As the realisation that he had won his first Tour stage became that bit little less of a dream and a little more reality, even the barrier of the…

Trucking hell A lorry on the course at the Tour of Luxembourg caused a major crash, where a number of riders went down. The vehicle was parked on the corner of a climb on stage 5, and was one of a series of incidents to raise safety concerns at the race which also led to a rider protest on stage 2. The UCI said the incidents would be reviewed at their Management Committee. “I do not have, and have never had, anything to hide” Nairo Quintana spoke out after his hotel room was raided by the French police during the Tour de France. Quintana and his brother, Dayer, attended voluntary police interviews following the race. The investigation was ongoing as Procycling went to press. 4000 The amount of Swiss francs…

COACH, DEVELOPMENT TEAM SUNWEB I like working with the younger cyclists at the other end of professional cycling. Nils is doing so far so good. Racing being back is good [for him], but it’s still not an optimal situation. Nils is a talented climber and he has a really good TT as well. In the under-23 ranks it’s always hard to tell where someone’s potential is, or where it will lead to. But I certainly see qualities in Nils’ climbing and time trialling. When you look at WorldTour racing nowadays, these are qualities that are [required] in 90 per cent of races. I see him as a guy who definitely can make it. If you look at his potential, you can see the form he showed last year and this…

Technology has completely changed the way that we prepare for races. It began with platforms such as TrainingPeaks where you can keep track of training data and even have a prediction of form. But since the introduction of Strava and Google Earth, they have combined to give accurate information regarding course profiles, road conditions and size as well as difficulty. In fact, the fabled roadbook for each race is becoming largely irrelevant, especially the seemingly hand drawn course profiles that most races provide us with. Now with the VeloViewer platform, which plots the gpx file for each race on Google Earth, we can start a race knowing exactly what each metre of road looks and will feel like. Strava can then tell you the fastest times on various sections so…

Great news my friends, I have racing to report on for the first time in seven months! I tried my best to keep my check-ins not too mundane over my time away, so thank you for bearing with me. Our eager team arrived in France after various quarantines and fascinating travel adventures and we prepared our stale racing legs for a nice and easy, relaxing, low-key race called La Course. With the only non-Dutch winner at the time, Chloe Hosking, on our squad, it was a huge deal for our team to be on the start line. It’s the most prestigious one-day race on the WorldTour calendar and it was our first since Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. No pressure! But really - no pressure. We went into the race with a…

1st Stage, Tour of Algarve 2019 Tour of Algarve 2019 Stage, Tour of California 2019 Tour of California 2019 National TT Champs 2019, 2020 Stage, Vuelta a Espana 2019 (3) Stage, Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana 2020 (2) Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana 2020 Stage, UAE Tour 2020 Stage, Tour de France 2020 (3) Tour de France 2020 2nd Stage, Itzulia Basque Country 2019 Stage, UAE Tour 2020 UAE Tour 2020 National RR Champs 2020 Stage, Tour de France 2020 National TT Champs 2018 3rd Stage, Tour of Slovenia 2019 Vuelta a Espana 2019 Stage, Criterium du Dauphine 2020 Stage, Tour de France 2020 4th Stage, Tour of Slovenia 2018, 2019 Tour of Slovenia 2018, 2019 Stage, Tour of California 2019 Criterium du Dauphine 2020 5th National TT Champs 2017…

SATURDAY AUGUST 29 Nice Moyen Pays › Nice 156KM It hadn’t rained in Nice for months. But as ironically as Alanis Morissette sang, the day the Tour de France peloton rolled into town for the first stage of the 2020 race, of course it poured. On a route that looped into and around the city, the heavens opened as the race ascended the Côte de Rimiez for the first time, turning the sky as grey and dark as the tarmac, and making the winding roads treacherous. Soon, riders were falling as quickly and as hard as the raindrops. Pavel Sivakov, on his Tour debut, was the first major casualty, falling twice before the finish and ceding chunks of time as well as a few layers of skin. Soon, it was…

MONDAY AUGUST 31 Nice › Sisteron 198KM After the rain and crashes of day one and the mountains of day two, the Tour sprinters finally gave themselves a decent chance of a stage win in Sisteron on the first Monday of the 2020 Tour. Cees Bol, Peter Sagan, Giacomo Nizzolo and Sam Bennett all had as good a run into the finish as could be hoped for, unlike Caleb Ewan, who was far back and boxed in when the sprint started. However, Ewan, the most successful sprinter in the 2019 race, slalomed around his competitors and squeezed through narrow gaps in a way that looked impossible, even in slow-motion on the overhead television shots. And the delay, caused by initially holding back and having to shimmy his way through to…

The big man-little man partnership is a classic trope of football. Think Kevin Phillips and Niall Quinn tearing it up for Sunderland in the late 1990s, or John Toshack and Kevin Keegan scoring for fun at Liverpool in the 70s. The big target man would knock down long balls for the little man to nip in and score, a tactic that worked repeatedly. It’s seen less in cycling, but big man-little man partnership is a good fit for what Connor Swift and Nairo Quintana have going on at Arkéa-Samsic. Quintana stands at just 1.67m, while Swift towers over him at 1.9m. Arkéa posted a video of the duo embracing each other after stage 7 of the Tour de France, Swift a whole head taller than the diminutive Colombian who nestles…

STAGE 6 was a day that I picked with the team. We had a long discussion about me sitting up on the previous day, because I was quite up there on GC. Normally, I hang in and do my thing and when I start dropping time in the high mountains I naturally then go in the breakaway. But dropping 10 minutes without a reason, just thinking about potentially going in the breakaway the next day, that was quite new for me. There was a little climb at the start which means the break could potentially go very quick if the speed was high, but there were rolling and very wide roads, so I was also ready for it to take an hour to go. Sometimes you don’t really predict when…

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 4 Millau › Lavaur 168KM The ‘vent d’Autan’, the seasonal wind which occasionally blows north across this part of France, sends a man mad, so the locals say. They never said anything about the hills doing it first. The crosswinds between Millau and Lavaur were only part of the stage 7 story. While the final 40km flattened making it look like a day for the sprinters, the parcours started with a cat-3 climb after 9km, and peppered even more uncategorised slopes into the first 100km. Add in a rampaging Peter Sagan, who started the stage without the green jersey for only the 26th time in the last eight years and the combination caused insanity in the peloton. Sagan’s Bora team set a fearsome pace from the gun to…

NEILSON POWLESS EF PRO CYCLING, 482KM Tour debutant Powless was one of the Tour’s most aggressive riders. The American came close to a win on stage 6 (also his 24th birthday), finishing fourth on Mont Aigoual, and then fifth two days later in Loudenville. RÉMI CAVAGNA DECEUNINCK-QS, 432KM It’s no surprise the big engined-French national TT champ was a frequent presence at the front of the race. He spent 125k (mostly alone) in a breakaway on stage 19, but his best result was 36th on stage 13 RICHARD CARAPAZ INEOS GRENADIERS, 390KM The Ecuadorian went on a hat trick of long-range breaks in the Alps, hunting stage wins, coming second in Villard-de-Lans, 11th on the Grand Colombier, and another second helping Michał Kwiatkowski win on stage 18. JULIAN ALAPHILIPPE DECEUNINCK-QS,…

THERE are two kinds of breakaways. The one that goes from the beginning, they are quite easy most of the time to get into with no happy end. They come back and they are on stages that are meant to be bunch sprints or really controlled races. It’s quite easy to get in them, you just have to start up at the front behind the car, and most of the time the first attack will go. The second one is the harder one. Most of the time it’s probably a break that can stick to the end, has more chances to survive. More riders will be interested to get into it and then it’s more about choosing the right moment. Being strong - of course, that’s always necessary - and…

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 8 Île d’Oléron › Île de Ré 168.5KM The bleak and imposing sea fortress of Fort Boyard, built as a naval defence in the 1800s, stands near the Île d’Oléron. Its impenetrable-looking walls were a reminder to the Tour peloton, if they looked out to sea, that today would be a day for defence. Unlike every other stage of the 2020 Tour, this one featured not a single climb. The obstacles were technical - narrow twisting roads and many roundabouts - and meteorological, with a stiff breeze blowing across the bunch as it approached the Île de Ré. The peloton’s defences were strong - an early break of Stefan Küng and Michael Schär was brought back within an hour, by dint of teams riding hard to keep out…

As Egan Bernal crossed the line on stage 15, having haemorrhaged over seven minutes to put the nail in the coffin of any hopes he had of retaining his Tour title, a yellow jersey hung behind his shoulder in the form of Wout van Aert. When Bernal finally cracked on the Grand Colombier, unable to keep up with the pace of the GC group, it was Van Aert on the front setting the devastating tempo and causing all the damage. How do you describe a rider like Wout van Aert? Cyclo-cross world champion, classics specialist, time triallist, puncheur and sprinter were the well-known strings on the Belgian’s bow, but super-mountain domestique and slayer of Bernal, perhaps not so much. Of course, Van Aert came into the Tour in blistering form,…

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13 Lyon › Grand Colombier 174.5KM Another Sunday, another win for Tadej Pogačar. On a day when attacks were largely kept in check due to the fearsome pace being set by Jumbo-Visma, the young Slovenian took his one opportunity to launch himself, outsprinting Primož Roglič to the line. There was no gap between the Slovenians, though, meaning that the only time gained back by Pogačar consisted of the bonus seconds on the line, but that put Roglič in sight at just 40 seconds ahead. Stage 15 was a tale of Jumbo-Visma controlling the day to perfection. Adam Yates attempted to attack and then straight away was reeled in by the yellow and black train, seconds after. The speed that Wout van Aert, George Bennett, Tom Dumoulin and Sepp…

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 16 Grenoble › Méribel - Col de la Loze 170KM Our memories of the 2020 Tour will be coloured in a different hue. The bright, washed-out sunlight of midsummer was swapped for the sharper distinctions of early autumn, with raking, horizontal light illuminating the race. Stage 17 also offered us a change in colour and mood, though not, in the end, of the race. The orange jerseys of Bahrain-McLaren silently and resolutely slid to the front of the peloton, over the Col de la Madeleine and thence to the Col de la Loze, and for once the front of the peloton was not coloured in yellow and black. The plan was to slingshot Mikel Landa into his favoured territory: high mountains in the third week of a grand…

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 18 Bourg-en-Bresse › Champagnole 166.5KM Stage 19’s lumpy route wasn’t a classic sprinters’ day. It featured 2,000 metres of climbing and mostly twisting, rolling roads. But with flat days few and far between in 2020 the sprinters put a tentative asterisk in the roadbook, if their post-Alps legs allowed it. Bora-Hansgrohe took control, trying one final time in vain to shake green jersey Sam Bennett, letting only his Deceuninck teammate Rémi Cavagna go up the road and preventing a big break scuppering things. But with Bennett stuck to Peter Sagan’s wheel like glue, things came back together and a sprint finish looked likely. Except, this is 2020. With 30km to go Oliver Naesen attacked, Sagan followed and Bennett followed him, setting off a 12-rider group of hitters that…

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 19 Lure › La Planche des Belles Filles 36.2KM (ITT) If Primož Roglič had been offered a deficit of 35 seconds on Tom Dumoulin in this time trial before the Tour, one would imagine that he’d have taken it. Roglič did come fifth, but what happened in front of him blew his yellow jersey hopes out of the water. Tadej Pogačar, nine years Roglič’s junior, in his first Tour de France, set a blistering time on La Planche des Belles Filles that could not be matched by anyone. So blistering a time, in fact, that Pogačar not only won the yellow and white jerseys, but the polka dot jersey, too. Roglič is a man who has won four grand tour time trials, including two at the Giro last…