Caley Fretz contributed to this report both in the sense of providing some of the actual ideas as well as being open to having crisps thrown in his face for the purposes of science.
Every Big Bike Race we attend in person, there are always article ideas that never see the light of day.
This can be for a number of reasons that usually boils down to a keener interest in self-preservation in the cold light of day the morning after the idea was initially cooked up, usually after exactly two (2) podcast beers.
But just because we didn’t actually write them doesn’t mean you, the paying member, doesn’t deserve to hear the premise behind them.
Without further ado, here’s what was left on the cutting room floor from this year’s Tour de France, a third instalment in this ongoing series following the 2023 Tour and the 2024 Spring Classics. And, to be clear, just because they didn’t get done this year doesn’t rule out the possibility for their publishing in the future.
Asking Guillaume Martin (respectfully) about his dead donkey
Ever since the 2023 Tour, when Guillaume Martin retired with COVID and went home to recover among his donkeys, I have wanted to have a spirited conversation with Guillaume Martin about which – if any – of his rustic fur children is his favourite. Surely they can’t all be? There are, after all, 15 of them: do they all have names? What are their individual quirks? Which is the cheekiest, the most stubborn, the most placid, the most doting? At a stage start in Orléans, I finally had my chance to ask Martin about his favourite donk. But in the interests of being a Normal Reporter I fumbled my approach – a boring question or two about his GC possibilities, before rushing to the meat of the interview just as he was about to dash off to sign on.
He told me he did (note: ominous past tense) have a favourite donkey that he grew up with – Valentin, a white donkey – acquired by his parents around the time Martin was born … but that this favourite donkey sadly died last year. After expressing my condolences, I asked if he had a favourite living donkey. He said “the black one called Joyeux, which means happiness.”
Did he feel any competition with known donkey and goat enthusiast Thibaut Pinot to have the best farm animals? Martin laughed, before concluding that they had enough competitions on the bike without worrying about getting competitive about their donkeys. (Iain Treloar)
Gallery: The faces of the caravan
The premise is simple: turn up a few hours before the start of the first stage of the Tour de France to wave off the year’s publicity caravan cohort and photograph the faces of those staffing it. The fearless French men and women who are primed and ready to dance the next three weeks away, throwing various promotional tat at their adoring French public.
Then, three weeks later, turn up a few hours before stage 21 to photograph the same characters again, to see how the Tour has changed them. Are they weathered and sun-burned? Miraculously still quite chipper and beautifully tanned? Has the light gone from their eyes? Have they found love amongst the crazy gang? Next year for definite with this one. (Jonny Long)
Can the Tour de France clean your clothes better than a laundromat?
At last year’s race, we calculated that using the Tour de France’s official concierge laundry service would set you back well over €100, a far cry from the €6 or so it would cost at your local depressing laundromat in whichever French town you find yourself in that day.
The smugness of continental legacy media types with their proper papers with sprawling budgets and the like, swanning over to the white tent to pick up a huge pile of their own freshly pressed kecks evokes the sort of jealousy you can only feel after two weeks spent in various sweaty gymnasiums fashioned into press rooms.
The real question here is whether this jealousy is warranted? Just how good can the Tour de France clean your clothes? To find out, we planned to take two identical (used) Uniqlo white t-shirts and wash one in your regular laundromat and hand the other over to the Tour laundry service providers for them to do their best with.
Another one to return to next year, after we’ve saved up the €4.35 to get a singular t-shirt cleaned. (JL)
Ben Healy is fashion man
We had an interview set up with Ben Healy for the second rest day (after we couldn’t get to his hotel in Florence pre-Tour due to our hire car being parked by a man we met on the street off somewhere in a mystery location – don’t worry, we obviously got it back) but understandably, the EF Education-EasyPost rider decided he had far more productive things to do with his time other than deal with our bullshit. A move we mightily respect.
Of course, we wanted to ask him about his incessant breakaway exploits this Tour, but also why does he ride with a lean? Has he always done that? And more importantly (if the interview seemed to be going well) whether he was aware of the meme showing him getting hurled around by Tadej Pogačar and the other GC boys? Finally, why does he not post any captions on his Instagram photos?
Maybe one day we’ll find out. (JL)
Crisp crime scene re-enactment
Remember the guy who threw crisps (more specifically Lay’s 3D’s Bugles Goût Nature) at both Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard and subsequently got arrested? While we hope he feels the full force of the law, we were also curious, what is it like to have crisps chucked into your face while riding at 20km/h?
Caley bravely stepped up to the plate and offered to be the test dummy. We bought the Bugles (a smaller pack than the one pictured here, to stay true to the crime itself) and our re-enactment was set. Then it slipped our mind, or we never really found the time to undertake such a stupid task. A week on, this is the miss that fills me with the most regret. (JL)
Bikepacker interviews (hard to tell who is one when they’re waiting on a mountain)
A quick one: we noticed way more bikepackers visiting the Tour de France this year than usual. They looked to be having a lot of fun with insane set-ups as we passed them on the road, and planned to interview them to find out more about what they were doing. Only problem was, at the top of a mountain where everyone has neatly laid their bikes at the side of the road, it’s almost impossible to pair the bike with the owner unless you wait until they are getting ready to leave, at which point they’re probably not that keen to spend 10 minutes chatting. (JL)
ASO’s yellow shorts don’t have pockets
Waiting for the caravan to pass in Embrun, we struck up a nice conversation with a promotional man called Adrien working for the ASO as a Tour village host. You can spot them by their jaunty yellow shorts, their playful straw boat-hats and their masterful command of English as they tell person after person that “yes, the village is this way” and “no, you cannot go in there without a pass.” In this, Adrien’s first year at the Tour de France, he was having a lovely time – tired as you would expect, but still full of vim and vigour. Of course we wanted to know about his lemon-coloured shorts, and it was here that a little gripe emerged. “Look,” he said. “They don’t even have pockets!” He pointed to the sides of his hips where pockets should normally be – a run of cosmetic stitching with no hole. As an onlooker, the depths of ASO’s trickery was annoying enough, but for Adrien there were practical implications: he had to keep his phone in his waistband like a lululemon yoga pants girlie. (IT)
The cursed time-warp of Buffalo Grill
A (probably vulgar) peculiarity of France that the Tour de France cameras don’t pick up is the roadside restaurant steakhouse chain Buffalo Grill. It is a Native-American themed restaurant located in the various armpits of this otherwise beautiful country, and is known to the Tour press corps due to it being open very late and therefore often the last port of call for reporters at the end of a long day at the race who require a slightly warm beer and a slightly soggy burger. Of course, this chain was designed in a more oblivious era, although they have not yet decided to catch up with the times, as staff can still on occasion be spotted wearing Native American headdress.
In part thanks to the experience of our fearless leader Caley Fretz, we have not suffered the indignity of having to dine here in the three years I’ve done the Tour with him, thanks in part to his strategy of always booking accommodation near the day’s finish town.
While Caley and I have dined here separately before, Iain has never had the … pleasure, and for the past couple of years have planned to take Iain so that he can review the place, warts and all. [Iain here: this is something I absolutely would love to do but you keep not letting me.] If we ever do complete this review, it’s probably a sign that we’ve simply run out of ideas or Tadej Pogačar has the race won by more than 10 minutes before the first rest day. (JL)
A grand day on the caravan (we unsurprisingly got big-timed by E.Leclerc)
Our fascination with the Tour de France publicity caravan at this point is well-documented. And as such, our reporting could only be furthered by experience it from the literal inside. Having managed to get in contact with someone in charge of the caravan flotilla for supermarket chain E.Leclerc, we met them briefly in the press room one day to negotiate terms on them potentially allowing us to ride in the caravan for the day.
The discussion went well, they were satisfied with our audience figures (in order to bring even more attention to the apparent wonders of everything E.Leclerc offers) and after a series of emails and WhatsApps seemingly weren’t put off by us in person to call the whole thing off. Iain even saw them looking at our website without apparent revulsion.
However, things went quiet for the next few days and then the day before our assigned voyage (on the stage between Agen to Pau) had been cancelled. Instead, one of E.Leclerc’s VIPs would be taking our spots. Absolutely fair enough, those VIPs in some way sort of pay for the Tour de France whereas we are mere limpets holding on for dear life to the bottom of the race’s hull.
Thanks for even considering us E.Leclerc, and in hindsight as we saw the caravan pass by on days where the sun beat down, we thanked our lucky stars we hadn’t spent five hours getting sunburned soundtracked by the screams of French children clamouring for freebies. (JL)
Bonus round!
Not stories, but still stuff that didn’t happen, for good reason.
Headlines that didn’t get written: ‘you’ll never guess what these guys are huffing’
While the working title amongst the wider Escape Collective group for Ronan McLaughlin’s excellent Carbon Monoxide investigation was the slightly tongue-in-cheek Ronan’s Big Adventure, speaking to the length and detail of the original transcript, one night at dinner another headline idea for the finished version was floated: You’ll never guess what these guys are huffing.
Obviously completely inappropriate, never really a true consideration, but still, this timeline exists in an infinite parallel universes scenario.
Slightly related: maillot sable interviews that didn’t happen
Things were going well with the 2024 Tour de France maillot sable competition (which is awarded to the rider each day who is closest to one hour behind on GC – although he has to be over the one-hour mark). We’d had Magnus Cort (Uno-X Mobility), Nicolas Prodhomme (Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale) and Bart Lemmen (Visma-Lease a Bike) all enjoy the light relief at the start of the day discussing the new jersey they’d been bestowed with, acknowledging the honour of “wearing” the sable in the peloton for the day and giving varying levels of commitment to fighting to keep it all the way to Nice.
However, in the aftermath of the carbon monoxide story we hit a slight speed bump, in that both Pavel Sivakov (UAE Team Emirates) and Wilco Kelderman (Visma-Lease a Bike) took over the jersey and whose teams had been involved in the story. Not the best timing for silly business.
Things then got even less hopeful for our coverage of the jersey as it passed in between Sivakov and Kelderman to Enric Mas (definitely not down with our flavour of bullshit and were Movistar even in the race?), Louis Meintjes (very not into our BS), then Julien Bernard (by all accounts a very nice man even if he’s hell-bent on bringing cycling into disrepute, but also we didn’t have a shared language with him), before the jersey then went back to Mas, then Meintjes, and then finally Mas again, who finished 19th, 1 hour and 11 minutes down on Pogačar.
More heartbreakingly, Jai Hindley was actually closest but not qualifying for the sable, at 18th place and 57 minutes adrift in the overall classification. Pretty sure he’d have hung his maillot sable up at home next to his maglia rosa …
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