Dear Thomas Gachignard,
On behalf of the international viewing public, I would like to offer a note of my sincere appreciation for taking this one for the team. Today, as you are aware (what with riding by yourself for several hours in the sun), it is very bloody hot. I am not riding a bike and still I broke a sweat walking from our little Citroën to the press centre. It’s just one of those kinds of days.
But we knew that would be the case, didn’t we? We are in the south of France, on a route that takes us toward the molten interior of the country, to a place called Nîmes that is so brazenly hot all the time that its town crest is an alligator with a jazzy collar wrapped around a palm tree. Last time I was here I downed a bit of rosé while recording a podcast in the sun somewhere, talked some nonsense about the Tour de France caravan, and sweated through a hot night in a house without any cooling measures beside the fact that it was a bit old and the walls were probably quite thick.
Anyway. I digress. Today, it is all about you, Monsieur Gachignard.
The thing is, today was always going to turn out like this. There have been many days on this Tour de France where the breakaway has been hard-fought and kept on a tight leash even once it had gone – the days where a brief advantage opened, was maintained for a while, and then it all came back together for the sprinters or the GC guys to compete for line honours. That’s fine! It makes for exciting racing in the cinematic scope of an entire Tour de France, where the big names that you have heard of jostle for seconds. But what it does not do is give the doomed French cohort of the peloton their opportunity to ride, in time-honoured fashion, off the front of the race for a few hours only to be caught in the dying moments of the stage, breaking the hearts of romantics everywhere. There is a script for this kind of ride, but until stage 16 of this year’s Tour de France, nobody had yet been able to perform the role.
Which makes the fact that you stepped up, today of all days, all the more brave. You, Mr Gachignard, knew that you were doomed from the outset of your lengthy solo breakaway on the hottest day of the race thus far, and you did it anyway.
What drove this objectively foolish decision? We can answer this question: the crude economics of cycling sponsorship. A team like TotalEnergies (this year not as doomed as usual, coverage-wise, thanks to a brave stage win and a potato-loving Burgaudeau, but old habits die hard) has to rep the interests of the big fuel company that pays the bills, the small bike brand they are astride, the Vendée region they come from, the customer journey-improving company that is the other top-tier sponsor which, even after reading their website, I still don’t really understand what they do. This is, I guess, part of an unspoken bargain with the ASO: you do your bit, and we’ll give you a platform.
For the 80-some minutes you were off the front, Thomas Gachignard, you were beamed across millions of screens, all of whom were idly pondering things like “What is that sponsor?” and “Poor guy, I bet he must be looking forward to stopping,” and “He’s never, ever going to make it, is he?” and especially “I’m just going to go and have a little lie down; can you wake me up when it’s kicking off?”
For 66 kilometres and almost an hour and a half, you transformed from someone I’d never heard of to the single most interesting thing that happened for most of this quite-boring stage of the Tour de France. You may not have a stage win, but you’ll probably get a combativity prize – and that’s something that noone can take away from you.
We salute you, Thomas Gachignard. You understood the doomed assignment, and you executed it to perfection.
Regards,
Escape Collective
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