BELFORT, France — Mauro Schmid’s teammates keep reaching for the same idea, expressed in different words. "He's the Swiss Army Knife," Luke Plapp said of his Jayco-AlUla teammate after stage 13 of the Tour de France. "He can do everything, on and off the bike."
Michael Matthews put it another way: "He's like a Swiss watch, always exactly on time, always cutting it fine." Both were describing the same rider doing the same thing, all afternoon into Belfort: being exactly where he needed to be, exactly when he needed to be there. Hovering at the back when he could to save energy, moving off the front in any split that mattered.
Winning out of a breakaway at the Tour de France takes strength, of course, but it also takes a nose for finding for the right moment. That’s particularly true in a break of nearly 60, a third of the whole peloton, that would split and rejoin a dozen times in a dozen different ways before the finish line. Getting to the finish first is akin to surfing, sitting just in the right place on the wave, not too far forward or too far back at the wrong times, lest you get dumped into the sea.
Schmid got himself into the day's decisive move early, and for a while, he was in it alone, which wasn't part of the plan. "When Mauro was there by himself, it wasn't ideal," directeur sportif Matt Hayman told Escape Collective after the stage, leaning on the back of a Jayco team car as teammates rolled up and grabbed a quick high five. But the racing around Schmid bought him room: Tom Pidcock’s Pinarello-Q36.5 team was busy trying to move up on GC, and two sprinters' teams were working to keep Lidl-Trek's Mads Pedersen from bridging across, which meant the Swiss rider could sit on the wave right where he needed to be.
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