Host country’s hopes of first title winner since 1985 are high after a breathtaking weekend thanks to Julian Alaphilippe’s risk-takingThe headline writers of L’Équipe seldom let you down. On Sunday they scraped the mould off a pun – JOUR DE FRANCE – held in storage for almost three and a half decades. Those words were chosen to celebrate a day on which all the nation’s stars aligned in the bike race that represents its greatest sporting spectacle: a Frenchman won the queen stage on the Col du Tourmalet with another Frenchman successfully defending the yellow jersey in its centenary year and the president of the republic along for the ride. And there was now the strong possibility that the race...
Making it to Paris is for every rider, from the maillot jaune to the lanterne rouge, an emotional experience that transcends racingThe Tour de France is big, really big. That’s the first thing that hits you, 4,500 people working on it, and only 176 of those are riding. There is no other bike race that even comes close to this scale. Yes, there are two other Grand Tours, the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España, yet they are family affairs in comparison.The nature of the course doesn’t vary massively: it’s approximately 3,500km long, made up of 21 stages, mixing from flat transitional days to battles of epic proportions over some of the highest mountain passes in Europe. The rider...
The route is designed to be more open, with more climbs amenable to attacks, and power meters could be banned. But there is little to cause Team Sky sleepless nightsIn yet another attempt to make the Tour de France a more open race, which will be seen as a further move to break Team Sky’s domination, the organisers are to push for the abolition of the use of power meters. The ubiquitous device which helps a rider to gauge his effort by recording power output as he rides also “annihilates the glorious uncertainty of sport”, according to the Tour organiser, Christian Prudhomme.It remains unclear whether this will be put in place for the 2019 edition, which looks particularly mountainous and...
The Welshman put a history of dramatic scrapes behind him by keeping his cool in the time trial to all but secure Tour victoryGiven the variety of ways he has managed to fall off his bike over the years, it would have been unlike Geraint Thomas to complete a Tour de France without a jitter of some kind, but a disturbing skitter of the back wheel on an early corner in Saturday’s time trial barely registered on his personal Richter scale. The Welshman is legendary for the injuries he has accumulated, among them the broken pelvis with which he completed the Tour in 2013, the collarbone he smashed in the Alps last year and the collision with a metal spring...
This week’s roundup also features pre-season friendly pass brilliance, waterskiing problems and silky AFL skills1) The Tour de France reaches its conclusion in Paris this weekend, which makes it worth a quick look back at the most memorable finishes on the Champs-Élysées. In 1991, elbows-out sprinter Djamolodine Abdoujaparov wore green into the final stage (despite controversy after he had forced Johan Musseeuw into the barriers on an earlier stage) but crashed on the final sprint – yet clung on to the jersey when the team got him over the line. But that finish pales into insignificance next to the 1989 finish, when Greg LeMond overcame his deficit to Laurent Fignon to time trial his way to victory in 1989. And...