The Tour’s peloton sprints down a wide boulevard lined by plane trees, ending under blazing sun before the riders scattered to their buses. For many of the riders, it was another day down: another day closer to the finish of the race, another stage passed without incident. But, more than halfway through the Tour, that wasn’t the case for everyone. The race is beginning to take a toll.
At 10 kilometres from the finish, there’s a big crash – Alexey Lutsenko hits a lane separator in the middle of the road, tumbling from one side to the other and sending a ripple effect through the bunch. Some are merely brought to a standstill. Others are not so lucky. The most newsworthy casualty is the perennially unlucky Primož Roglič, who despite a concerted chase back with five of his teammates, concedes two and a half minutes and two positions in his fight for the GC. For a second day in a row, he crosses the line battered, making his way through a gaggle of journalists at the team bus.
Tempers are frayed. “What the fuck,” barks a Red Bull Bora Hansgrohe staffer at a journalist wandering gormlessly in the path of an incoming Bob Jungels. The shoulder of Roglic’s jersey is torn; blood blooms from road rash on his shoulder, and there are four small but bloody grazes on his right knee. His helmet looks like it’s been grated across the ground. One particularly enterprising (read: annoying) fan runs alongside him, his souvenir a selfie of an unsmiling Slovenian and a bloody smear on his white t-shirt as he bumps against Roglic. Poor guy can’t catch a break.
I wander down to Total Energies, who’ve had a Tour of up and downs. Ups: a gutsy underdog stage win for Anthony Turgis in Troyes. Downs: 11 of their team bikes being stolen overnight. As such, Turgis, in the breakaway today, was racing without even a spare bike, and the team is rushing spare bikes from its service course in Vendée, 500 kilometres away. Will they be here tomorrow? “Maybe, maybe tonight, maybe never,” comes the enigmatic response. Sandy Dujardin pulls up with his arm draped in a cool cloth, a plaster cast underneath because his bone is – and has been for several days – bruised. He will take it day by day, I’m told, and he is tough. He has a tough cuddle from his girlfriend while I watch. It is lovely (and also, I must toughly stress here, quite tough).
Up a few buses to Lotto-Dstny. There were a couple of their riders that crashed in the Lutsenko pileup, one of them severely enough that he lies on the road for an extended period of time. You know it’s not good when a couple of teammates stay with him to check that he’s OK. In the immediate aftermath, I’d asked some Lotto helpers whether they had any word if he was alright. They weren’t sure, but hoped so, as did I. After the finish, I asked a couple of folks for an update. He’d hit his head, they said, and we might be able to talk tomorrow if he started. The medical report said he had a sore back, which felt euphemistic – but who knows, I’m not a doctor.
To Bahrain-Victorious. Pello Bilbao, their beautiful soul of a Basque rider, had a terrible day, falling off the back early on a profile that you would not, on face value, say was one to trouble a rider of the calibre of Pello Bilbao. He DNFed mid-stage, adding a sense of growing concern for whether something’s ripping through Bahrain-Victorious. I walk up to a man that looks like Roman Kreuziger (maybe even is!) who alleges that no-one is sick except Pello Bilbao, which kind of neglects to account for Fred Wright’s outside-time-limit departure from the race a day earlier. As I’m leaving, I catch a glimpse of Matej Mohorič slumped across the back of a van being driven off somewhere, so someone’s fibbing.
In other – and maybe unrelated – news, Astana-Qazaqstan’s lead-out hero, Michael Mørkøv, failed to the start the day due to a positive COVID test.
Down the road a little to the DSM-Firmenich-Post NL bus. The team’s big sprint hope, Fabio Jakobsen, had climbed off early in the stage and withdrew soon after, struggling to keep the pace. “We could have made him ride and see, ‘can you make the time cut?’ But at that moment in the race, I think you have to put the rider first – emotionally as well as physically. I think it was the right decision that he goes home,” DSM director Matt Winston told media after the stage. A few minutes earlier, Jakobsen had been outside the bus in civilian clothes, wearing a mask. Just “a precaution,” Winston had told me.
On the way back to the press room, I have a lovely chat with a couple of members of the EF-Education First media team. They detail, at length, their beef with the Tour de France merch sellers, one of whom bartered a T-shirt in exchange for the (apparently lucrative) EF bidons. After being handed a bottle – laying it on thick about how pink was her favourite colour, etcetera – the merch seller had skipped off into the distance without completing her side of the exchange, a mystery French caravan woman who’d duped an EF staffer out of a promotional yellow T-shirt. That’s reason enough to be salty, in our books.
As I’m about to say goodbye, there’s a moment of excitement as a rider walks into our midst. It’s Known Nice Man Neilson Powless, who needs to go to the hospital to be checked out. I ask if he’s OK. He says he “might’ve fractured something”, his wrist looking a little bit nasty. I express my regret about this development, by which I mean that I say “fuck, I hope you’re OK,” which is the same thing I said to the Lotto-Dstny crew earlier and have said at several other points previously this Tour because what are these people if not humans and what is life if not relating to them on those human terms.
As I complete my journey back to our sweaty gymnasium press room, I reflect on the moments of quiet carnage that I’ve seen – a day that wasn’t defined by awful mountains or peloton-felling crashes, but just the normal day-by-day business of the Tour de France. And it wasn’t even a day of particular attrition, but rather a fairly ordinary, transitional, not even all that noteworthy day of the race.
But here’s the thing: an ordinary day on this bike race has produced carnage, ruled numerous household name cyclists out of the race, and left several others in the balance. Or, as one press officer sarcastically put it, “Vive le Tour.”
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