I’ve spent a lot of time watching the Tour de France over the last few weeks, and am sad to report there hasn’t been a lot of bird action this year. Midway through the first week there were a few minutes of footage of some kind of treetop heron rookery, shot from a helicopter. I believe the birds were great egrets, but it was difficult to get a sense of scale from that distance, so it was also possible they were little egrets.
This is not to say the tour has been completely devoid of wildlife. On stage 11, a red deer came out of nowhere, sprinted across a mown hay field, leaped across the road about 100 yards in front of the oncoming fast-moving peloton, and then leaped through a hedge on the far side of the road, and kept going full tilt through another mown hay field. If it had happened a few seconds later, it could have been rough for both the deer and the riders. But man, could that deer run.
Other, non-wildlife-related things have happened in the race, though.
The dominant rider typically becomes clear in the first week, especially after the first serious mountain climb. That’s when all the pretenders and wannabes crack, or at least show some weakness. And that’s been the case from third place on down this year. As of July 17, the current third-place rider, Carlos Rodriguez of Spain, is five minutes and 21 seconds back, which is a very large time gap to overcome.
But the first- and second-place riders – Jonas Vingegaard of Denmark and Tadej Pogacar of Slovenia – are in one of the tighter races I have ever seen. Vingegaard won the tour last year. Pogacar won two years before that. It looked like Vingegaard would be the dominant rider, and probably win this year, especially after Pogacar cracked climbing the Col de Marie Blanque on the fifth stage and lost 56 seconds. But since then, Pogacar has been chopping at Vingegaard’s lead like a crafty lumberjack, taking 28 seconds here, 16 seconds there.
Vingegaard is now down to a 10-second lead. Both riders, and both their teams, have been making massive efforts to crack the other one, but they are still as close to tied as they can get. I have no idea what is going to happen. Which is kind of fun.
That’s the main show, but as always with the tour, it’s the subplots that I really love.
Two of this year’s best subplots have been a bit sentimental, as it’s the last tour for some of the peloton’s more famous riders. First is the Slovak Peter Sagan, who I still think of as the slightly crazy newcomer, though he is now 33. He’s a sprinter, and at his peak, he found unexpected, seemingly uncharted routes through the peloton during bunch sprints that can hit up to 40 mph.
He won the green sprinters jersey in the Tour de France seven times.
It’s his goofiness that has made him so fun, though. He’s famous for such things as winning the Slovak amateur championship on a department store bike he borrowed from his sister, because he accidentally sold his own bike. In interviews he would do things like play with the height of his chair, to the point where his chin was almost resting on the desk. He would ride parts of the Alps wheelies up because he wasn’t going to win that day, anyhow. And the crowds loved it.
The careers of great sprinters tend to follow a pretty reliable bell curve – they’re pretty good, they’re really good, they’re unbeatable for a while, they’re really good, they’re pretty good, then they stop winning. They never really return to greatness. And it’s been that way for Sagan. At 33 he’s certainly not the oldest guy in the pack, but he just seems done with it, at least road cycling. He says the thing he really wants to do now is race mountain bikes. He’s vied for sprints a little bit this year, but he seems to be more about taking a victory lap. Which he’s earned.
Mark Cavendish from the U.K. is the other rider slated to retire. He’s from the Isle of Man and is known as the Manx Missile for his explosive speed. He came in as a brash young firebrand, a fountain of arrogance and acceleration. Sprinting can get very physical – the late commentator Paul Sherwin referred to it as the argy-bargy – and Cavendish had a reputation for mercilessly tussling with other riders, sometimes bumping them into the barriers or causing them to go down hard on the pavement. Though, oddly enough, he left the 2017 Tour de France on a stretcher after a high-speed collision with Peter Sagan, who was then ejected from the tour (though a lot of people felt that was an unfair decision).
Over the years Cavendish has evolved, softened as a personality, becoming a beloved character of the peloton. In 2021, when his career seemed in its twilight, on the far side of the bell curve, he ended up winning four stages in the tour, tying Eddy Merckx (the greatest cyclist who ever lived) for the most Tour de France stage wins in history. And then in 2022, despite riding well, his team left him off the tour roster and told him they weren’t renewing his contract.
For 2023 he signed with a team that folded before it started, was a free agent briefly, and then was picked up by the venerable Astana-Qazaqstan team.
He was in the mix on stages three and four, finishing sixth and fifth in the sprints.
On stage seven he sprinted faster than anyone in the peloton, hitting over 46 mph, despite a skipping chain. But he was poorly placed in the bunch and finished second.
And then on stage eight, he went down in a small crash with a teammate in the peloton. As soon as the cameras were on him you knew, by the way he held his arm, that he’d broken his collarbone. His tour was done. He was barely holding it together as they loaded him into the van.
Alexander Vinokurov, the Astana-Qazaqstan team’s general manager, said that if Cavendish wanted to, he’d love to have him back for 2024. I get it if Cavendish has decided he’s had enough. But man, I hope he comes back for one more season.
