PAU, France — Rarely has a mission been so doomed as Baptiste Veistroffer's was in stage 5 of this Tour de France. Nobody thought he was going to win Wednesday's stage. Not his Lotto-Intermarché team, not the peloton that let him go without a second thought, and probably not even Veistroffer himself. On a day drawn up for the sprinters, a lone breakaway on the flatlands to Pau put the doom in doomed.
But the move mattered more than such a breakaway usually does. Lotto-Intermarché came into this Tour needing something to point to. The team has struggled for years, through sponsor pull-outs and swaps and mergers, and a difficult spring led to an even worse Tour. The team’s marquee rider, Arnaud De Lie, was anonymous through the Classics and then came down with an illness at the start of the Tour. He was one of the first out of this year’s edition. The team seemed to be stuck in a rut. Or a pit, maybe. A very deep one, with spikes at the bottom.
When a team is in this place, in the pit with the spikes, it doesn’t take all that much to feel like it’s climbing out. The mood at the Lotto bus on Wednesday in the half hour after the stage was as close to joyful as I have seen. Riders cooling down, high fives, a smiling Jean-François Bourlart, the team’s CEO, chatting with any reporter available. After a nightmare Grand Depart, the team finished fourth in the sprint via Huub Artz, normally a leadout man who had been left to his own devices and pulled his best-ever Tour result. And it had one of the stories of the day in Veistroffer, the one man bold enough to attack far from Pau.
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