BARCELONA –
Time trials are boring? Not anymore, they're not.
The last time the Tour de France opened with a race against the clock, we watched as Yves Lampaert took a surprise win in 2022. He wiped away tears of joy in Copenhagen, declaring his disbelief that a farmer's boy could be elevated to the yellow jersey. It all proved charming, but it lacked the bite to give true lift-off to one of the world's biggest sporting events.
Maybe after that Tour organiser ASO had finally had their fill of earnest heart-wrenchers for race openers, the final straw before they dispensed with the way opening time trials had been done. Tossed aside into the bin of history, the same pile where sat the approach of opening the race with six sprint stages in a row. Instead, as they learned with the closing-kilometre launchpads of the Julian Alaphilippe era, they decided the summer eyeballs of sports fans desperate for action in early July would get just that, and to do it with a team time trial verged on showboating.
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