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Welcome back to Spin Cycle! Escape Collective’s news digest.
Here we are, the second and final rest day of the Tour de France. We finally cracked atop the summit finish of stage 15 (contributing factors are detailed later on) but we are hoping a restorative day in and around Mont Blanc will set us straight before a huge final week of the Tour. Is Grand Tour racing supposed to be this exciting? We’re not sure but are loathe to speak about it too loudly in case we scare it away.
We also have another guest appearance from Iain Treloar in this edition, his final contribution before heading home from the Tour. Please keep him in your thoughts as he goes airborne for an unfathomably long amount of time to get home to Australia, leaving at 5pm on Monday and not arriving until 5am on Wednesday. At least Australian border security is so tight that he’ll have to get his shoes fumigated at customs before he can be re-united with his family, so that’s fun!
12 angry Dutchmen
So, following one of the more ruinous selfies in the history of selfies (and we imagine there is a long list to choose from) Jumbo-Visma will be suing the spectator that caused Sepp Kuss and Nathan van Hooydonck to crash on stage 15
“I think we owe that to the riders who were lying on the ground. Not only from us, but also from other teams,” team boss Richard Plugge told NOS.
The French gendarmerie opened an investigation following the incident and have identified the spectator, Le Parisien reports. Therefore, Jumbo-Visma are able to file a report against the local man (ruins everything) from Annecy.
“We will definitely try to recover the expenses from that person,” sports director Arthur van Dongen told NPO Radio 1.
You would imagine Jumbo-Visma are also trying to do their bit for turning the tide against dangerous behaviour from roadside fans. They were, you likely recall, directly involved in the infamous 2021 Opi-Omi incident, where the woman who held up the sign for her grandparents and crashed half the team, including Primož Roglič, was eventually fined €1,200.
Of course, roadside fans are a sacrosanct part of bike racing and maybe rare incidents are an unfortunate part of it. Either way, maybe Jumbo-Visma need to incorporate some sort of pre-Tour prosecution preparation at the Dauphiné to make sure they arrive in top legal shape next year.
Meanwhile, Tadej Pogačar spent his rest day backflipping into a swimming pool.
? Spotted at the Tour ?
Pissing off the edge of the world
On top of the mountain for the stage 15 Saint-Gervais Mont-Blanc finish was a bar selling thimbles of rosé and pumping out distinctly average tunes while the proprietors stood behind the bar eating ribs and frites. It was a weird vibe, capped off by (and sorry for those who have already heard this anecdote in podcast form) a man so drunk that he mistakenly or willingly urinated against the side of the bar unbeknownst to the manager standing a few feet away from it. What’s worse is that after he vacated the scene a family rocked up with a couple of golden retrievers who promptly hydrated themselves. The mountain scenes may look amazing on telly but there’s a dark side to them too!
Bad-vibes press room gift of the Alps
by Iain Treloar
As Europe sweats through a huge heatwave, our press room in a tent in the Alpine town of Saint Gervais – in the shadows of Mont Blanc – was a rough place. Thoughtfully, the local town provided a bag of local wares to help us through our discomfort. The pièce de résistance: an aerosolised bottle of “pure thermal water” from the mountain above us, the perfect product to “soothe, moisturise, repair”.
An infographic on the back of the bottle proudly pointed out that the water “fell 6,000 years ago” and has been trapped in the glaciers of Mont Blanc ever since – a fact that doesn’t take much of a leap to bad vibes when you realise that heatwaves are speeding the glacier’s demise, so it can be put into little bottles, to be squirted onto sweaty consumers for a luxury spritzing, using nitrogen as the propellant. Pure nitrogen propellant is environmentally inert, but humans are prolific users of nitrogen in more active forms (as in fertilizer), which often becomes nitrous oxide. As the UN helpfully points out, N2O is 300 times more potent at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and hangs around for a full century. Seldom has humanity’s impact on the climate crisis been more neatly encapsulated. Simply nothing more refreshing than the end of days. At least they included some gin.
Worried bus driver
I can only imagine how safe I would feel in the warm embrace of Yves Lampaert, the resolutely Flemish farmer’s son. Soudal Quick-Step bus driver Dirk Clarysse on the other hand must know something we don’t judging by his expression. Or maybe he’s just looking at a pair of the Safety Joggers hovering below his headshot. They’re enough to make you car sick while stuck behind the bus in traffic.
Feed Zone ?
? TotalEnergies Pierre Latour has opened up about his fear of descending: “It’s a vicious circle,” he told Le Parisien. “I brake while the others ride on. Other riders blaze past me from very close at high speed, which makes me even more anxious. I can feel the wind past me as they rush by and that makes me tense even more. Then I get the feeling that I have forearms that weigh fifty kilograms. I am completely paralysed.”
?? Charlotte Kool (DSM-Firmenich) won the first four stages of the Baloise Ladies Tour before she was forced out due to illness. Lidl-Trek’s Lucinda Brand won the race overall.
?? European mountain bike champion Puck Pieterse took gold in the Dutch national mountain bike championship over the weekend.
? Tour de Tietema-Unibet, YouTube personality Bas Tietema’s cycling project, will become a ProTeam-level outfit next season.
?️ Lotto-DSTNY have broken open Arnaud De Lie’s current contract (set to expire at the end of 2024) and offered him a new deal until 2026, Het Laatste Nieuws reports, while Oliver Naesen is expected to re-sign with Ag2r Citroën for another two years despite interest from Intermarché-Circus-Wanty and Lotto-DSTNY.
? The Het Laatste Nieuws boys haven’t been having much of a rest day, as they also suggest Ag2r Citroën will replace their BMC bikes with the Decathlon brand Van Rysel next year, and the brand will also take over from Citroën as title co-sponsor. Nans Peters and Benoît Cosnefroy have also signed contract extensions with the squad.
❗ Again, the HLN boys have another doozy (if you’re Belgian, please buy their newspaper, we’re just providing a free translation service) as they reckon Soudal Quick-Step are in for the 33-year-old Mikel Landa!
? Dries Devenyns, who will turn 40 on Saturday, has announced he will retire from cycling at the end of the year.
?? 20-year-old Irish talent Darren Rafferty has signed a two-year contract with EF Education-EasyPost. A pretty good week for him after winning the Giro Valle d’Aosta-Mont Blanc yesterday.
?? Jonas Vingegaard will not compete in the Glasgow Worlds road race, instead the Danish squad will be headlined by Mads Pedersen and Mattias Skjelmose.
? Meanwhile, the Belgian’s squad for Glasgow is looking ‘okay,’ with Wout van Aert, Remco Evenepoel and Jasper Philipsen announced as the headline names.
? Lotto-DSTNY’s Maxim Van Gils (second on the Grand Colombier stage) crashed in training, as did his dad, following a collision with a small truck. He has pain in his shoulders but no fractures so will start the time trial tomorrow.
Cycling on TV ?
Tuesday
Tour de France, stage 16 (ITT)
GCN+ (07:45-13:10 ET/12:45-18:10 BST/21:45-03:10 AEST)
Coverage also available for American viewers on Peacock premium
Wednesday
Tour de France, stage 17
GCN+ (07:00-13:00 ET/12:00-18:00 BST/21:00-03:00 AEST)
Coverage also available for American viewers on Peacock premium
Thursday
Tour de France, stage 18
GCN+ (08:00-13:15 ET/13:00-18:15 BST/22:00-03:15 AEST)
Coverage also available for American viewers on Peacock premium
Friday
Tour de France, stage 19
GCN+ (08:00-13:00 ET/13:00-18:00 BST/22:00-03:00 AEST)
Coverage also available for American viewers on Peacock premium
? Sprint at warp speed up a climb challenge (possible) ?
Every time I watch this video of Pogačar and Vingegaard sprinting, like, full-on sprinting to the summit of the Joux Plane at an unfathomable speed, it helps provide some welcome context to just what these guys are capable of.
? Tour de France doping question of the week ?
Ding ding ding! Finally we get some doping questions, a time-old tradition at the Tour de France. A certain level of suspicion is healthy. Look, your own parents lied to you about the tooth fairy and Father Christmas so it should come as no surprise that cyclists are also capable of medium-to-large fibs.
To the yellow jersey Jonas Vingegaard’s credit, he’s never shirked a question about doping. Last year, when the race leader was asked the inevitable question of whether we could trust his performances, he actually used the word ‘clean’, which shows you just how low the bar has been set previously.
Asked again before the second rest day on how the super fast climbing times (a less than exact science it’s important to point out) of this year’s Tour could be viewed suspiciously, he again came up with the goods.
“To be honest, I fully understand the scepticism and I think we have to be sceptical because of what happened in the past because otherwise it will just happen again, I would say,” the Dane said.
“In that way, I fully understand all the questions we get about it. The only thing I can say is I’m not taking anything. But yeah, to be honest, I’m happy there’s a bit of scepticism about it because we are going faster, we are going quicker than back then, maybe. I think it’s a good thing. And also, the food, the material, the training, everything is different. But again, it’s always good to be sceptical about it, or to think about it, at least.”
Even if it is one of the most developed answers we’ve gotten out of him this whole Tour, it would likely be worse for all parties if he didn’t prep what he was going to say when asked. Vingegaard hasn’t got a lot of credit this Tour, but he can have a big pile of it in this instance.
And finally…
At long last, I think I’ve found my spiritual home.
? Primes (for helpful members) ?
Thank you to Bernie from the members-only Escape Collective Discord (which has been a delight to be on during this Tour) for the Dauphiné warm-up prosecution line (if it hadn’t occurred already, we are obviously not above borrowing jokes).
And thanks to esteemed freelance cycling journalist and author Andy McGrath for the laundrette photo from Praz-sur-Arly, where he was spending the second Tour rest day.
“I’m in a launderette with a single Google review – one star,” he wrote. “€5.20 while writing up a Sepp Kuss interview in here … washing machine maybe a metaphor for the life of a Grand Tour domestique?”
“It’s been on ’30 minutes left of cycle’ for about an hour,” he continued, and thus the solitary one-star review was explained. “Maybe I’ll live here now.”
The one-star Google review? “Laundry washing at the bare minimum. The machines are really disgusting,” the unhappy customer wrote. “My wash was acceptable to be honest,” McGrath said. “3-4 stars.”
There you go, officially too much information about a laundrette you will likely never go to in your life but that concludes our special rest day Tour de France laundrette photos for this year.
As always, we are accepting your own laundry photos (especially ones with the doors open so we can Photoshop riders inside the drum) to star in Spin Cycle. Either send them via the Discord or shoot me an email: [email protected]
Until next time …
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