Richard — aka Mr. Pez — was unavoidably detained this morning, so Trash Man Mike has taken on Stage 1 coverage. Snark alert!
As you Pezzers know, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. I hence awoke — alarmless — at 5:30 here on North America’s West Coast, ready to watch some Tour.
Alas: those Spaniards are rather insistently evening-focused; Stage 1, this novel approach to kicking off the Grand Boucle, wasn’t starting until 5:05 p.m. Barcelona time. I fell back to sleep on the couch.
Once I awoke to the strains of Phil and Bob, however — sorry aficionados; I’m here in the U.S. and haven’t yet plunked down for a VPN, so Peacock it is for me — here’s what I saw.
We duffers know that when you do a max HR test, you gradually build up your effort, put yourself into the anaerobic zone — and then sprint for all you’re worth.
As I watched Bling Matthews powering through the final meters, grimace on his face, and then crumple in exhaustion, I realized that the Tour’s organizers have crafted a brilliant first stage: a max-HR test with implications on the General Classification, against the backdrop of Barcelona’s spectacular landscape and architecture.
The day started, fittingly, with Caja Rural-Seguros RGA — the plucky ProTeam given the honor of setting the very first mark, Alex Molenaar dropped on the final climb like a used tissue as his teammates ground on without him. Nobody remembers who goes off first in a TTT. Somebody has to, though, and it might as well be the underdogs.
Then came the subplot I didn’t see coming: Picnic PostNL playing it cute at the first intermediate checkpoint, deliberately banking the best split there because the green jersey — yes, green, on stage one, for a time trial, this Tour loves its gimmicks — goes to whoever’s fastest to that point. “We’d like to start the Tour on a positive note,” they said, which is racing-speak for “We know we’re not winning the whole thing but we’ll take what we can get.” Bold strategy. Except Netcompany INEOS blew through their split anyway, and Egan Bernal — Bernal! — pulled on green before promptly abandoning his own teammates on the road later in the stage when he cracked. Cycling doesn’t do poetic justice often, but it flirted with it today.
Phil Liggett is known for his malapropisms — We weren’t 20 minutes into the broadcast before he called Mathieu van der Poel “Adrie” — but in summing up the key to success in this first stage, he spoke facts: It’s all about delivering your man to the line. Every team here was running its own little chess match — who to sacrifice, who to save, who to ride into the ground three kilometers out so the GC contender could finish alone. Movistar spent half the stage waiting on a struggling, ever-mercurial Cian Uijtdebroeks (which is a nice way of saying they lost the day before it mattered). Lidl-Trek lost Mattias Skjelmose to a flat and just kept rolling — no waiting, no mercy, because in this format, stopping for a teammate is stopping for nobody.
Ganna, of course, was the day’s chief blunt instrument. Vauquelin flatted in the finale (cruelly, given he’s one of the GC dark horses everyone’s been quietly murmuring about) and Netcompany INEOS didn’t so much as glance in their collective mirror. Ganna dragged them to a time that held up as the provisional benchmark for what felt like an hour: 31 seconds up on Alpecin-Premier Tech, who themselves had gotten a properly filthy final kick from Mathieu van der Poel to snatch that record before INEOS erased it. Riding the wheel of a rapidly-rising Mathias Vacek to the final climb, Ayuso came within eight seconds of Ganna’s mark riding for Lidl-Trek. Close. Not close enough. That’s the whole event in two very short sentences.
And then the GC favorites, saved for last like dessert. Evenepoel, world time trial champ, did what Remco does: rode impatiently, and for himself. He dropped his own team, including Florian Lipowitz (team leadership question answered?), because sharing the workload only works until someone can’t hold the wheel.
Visma | Lease a Bike then produced the stage’s cleanest bit of theater: Jorgenson and Piganzoli (who quickly made this team miss Wout van Aert far less) towing Vingegaard to the base of the final kick, then peeling off and leaving him to solo it home. That’s delivering your man to the line in its purest form: no fireworks, just addition and subtraction done perfectly.
Which left UAE Emirates-XRG to answer, thirteen seconds down entering the last climb, with exactly the ammunition you’d want in that situation: Isaac del Toro and Tadej Pogačar. Pogačar detonated on the climb…and still came up twelve seconds short of Vingegaard. Twelve seconds, day one, and somehow it already feels like the whole Tour’s temperature has been taken. Pogi gets the polka dots as a parting gift for having the fastest legs on the Tour’s first “mountain.”
A max-HR test with a scoreboard attached, dressed up in Barcelona’s finest architecture. Twelve seconds separating the two best riders on the planet before a single actual mountain has been climbed. If that’s not the ideal way to kick off three weeks of this, I don’t know what is. (Though next time I’m looking at the schedule before rolling out of bed at 5:30.)
Top Ten GC Standings after Stage 1 of the 113th Tour de France – courtesy of Pro Cycling Stats
Follow all The PEZ Tour de France coverage here
• The PEZ Tour de France Stage by Stage Guide to Week 1
• Tour de France through the Decades: the 80s
• The Lost Phil Liggett Interview from the 1990 Tour de France
• EUROTRASH Ranks the Last 10 Tours
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