I remain one of eight Americans who follows the Tour de France. For nearly a decade, the Tour has been dominated by big teams right from the start, to the point where, barring incidents, the winner was nearly foreordained. The event was becoming sclerotic. Everyone knew everyone else's strengths and weaknesses. Everyone knew the optimal strategy at any point. This year, a number of things happened to shake it up.
First, the leader -- Chris Froome -- of the dominant team -- Ineos (formerly Sky) -- dropped out with an injury a few weeks before the race. Shouldn't have been a big deal, but his backup -- Geraint Thomas -- was only given co-leadership along with a new young rider -- Egan Bernal. That suggested that team did not have total faith in Thomas and/or was looking to the future as much as the current race. Though they still looked to have the strongest team, that opened the door to all sorts of other possibilities.
Second, intentionally or not, the course changed to further open the door to alternatives outcomes. They skewed some of the more difficult stages to earlier in the race and adjusted at least one of the stages in the Alps to have a descent on the finish. In other words, it did not as heavily reward great climbers as it normally does. It was not an upheaval, just a slight shift in emphasis.
As a result a lot of actual bike racing was going on and there was drama galore. An unexpected leader -- Julian Alaphilippe -- emerged and surprised everyone with both what he could do and how long he could hold on. It was the sort of surprise that the deck was stacked against in the recent past. With each stage he was gaining more and more adherents and more and more people were actually questioning whether his expected eventual collapse would happen.
Then came the real weirdness. One team -- Movistar -- actually got so twisted up over strategy that they probably lost an opportunity to win the Tour when a rider -- Nairo Quintana -- took off and carved a huge chunk out of the current leader and could've carved out even more if his team was set on supporting a different rider -- Mikel Landa -- and so let him proceed ahead on his own, without the help that would have turned him into a contender. A truly bizarre happening.
It got weirder when came the landslide. The leader was caught behind on a big climb early in one of the final stages and the question was whether he could recover on the descent, at which he is the best in the world when suddenly the stage was called to a halt. Torrential rains triggered a landslide over a huge swath of the course. As such the day ended with a new leader and a never to be answered question about what could have been.
Perhaps ironically, the winner did end up being a climber from the most powerful team, and his co-captain took second place. But at least it wasn't foreordained. That made this one of the best Tours in many years. Let's hope this Tour clued the race organizers in to the need to mix things up a bit more often. Admiring the French countryside and the fitness of cyclists in general isn't enough to hold interest.
Addendum: One of the more frustrating aspects of watch the Tour is the abysmal TV coverage; they lose track of riders and a couple of the announcers (I won't name them) make truly inane comments. They get no coverage of attacks or crashes until they are over and being sorted out. Honestly, can they not just put a chip on every bike. Better yet, a camera. Or why not use drone cameras. Hell, we don't even get a split screen. It's straight out of the '70s. It's really remarkable for such a huge event to have so little thought and resources put into TV coverage. I suppose given there are only 8 of us in the U.S. paying attention we should be happy with what we get. On the other hand, with some better and more dramatic footage, maybe there'd be more than 8 of us.
