Introduction
This is my live* blow-by-blow report of Stage 15 of the 2020
Tour de France, from Lyon to Grand Colombier. Why the asterisk? Well, I’m watching live, but you came later.
Why did you do that? Because it’s 5:40 a.m. and you’re wisely asleep as I watch
this race. Good call. Plus, you don’t just want to watch the coverage and try
to make sense of it … you want my commentary, even if it becomes snide and
accusatory at times, right?
Check out this profile. It’s gonna be an epic day.
Tour de France Stage
15 – Lyon to Grand Colombier
As I join the action, Phil Liggett is talking about the
scenery and some abbey. Bob Roll joins in and mentions the abbey is famous for
their aperitifs. This might not seem important to you, but it means a lot to
me: it means the riders aren’t on the first major climb yet. That’s huge. When
I’m not quite awake, it’s jarring to have to try to makes sense of what’s going
on.
There’s a breakaway of eight riders, with a 4:32 gap on the
peloton. The only good general classification rider in it, as far as I can
tell, is Pierre Rolland (B&B Hotels-Vital Concept). But he sits 18th on GC,
over 34 minutes back.
They’re showing a start line interview they filmed
earlier with Sepp Kuss (Jumbo-Visma), the sensational American
super-domestique. He’s had an awesome (albeit short) season so far, winning a
stage of the Critérium du Dauphiné last month, and riding superbly for his team leader, Primoz Roglic, who leads
the GC by 44 seconds over his Slovenian countryman, the teenager Tadej Pogacar
(UAE Team Emirates). Okay, Pogacar isn’t actually a teenager, but he looks like
he’s about 14. Anyway, here’s some of the Kuss Interview:
INTERVIEWER: It is a big day today, can you divulge your
strategy so that other teams can hear it?
KUSS: Blah blah blah [banal generalities because he’s not an
idiot] blah blah blah.
INTERVIEWER: Will you adopt the same strategy you used in
the Tour de l’An, on some of this same
terrain?
KUSS: Actually, I didn’t race the Tour de l’An [you fricking
idiot].
INTERVIEWER: It’s your birthday today, right?
KUSS: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: What would be your ideal birthday present?
KUSS: I know you want me to say something about defending
Primoz’s lead and stuff, but actually I’ve had my eye on a nice electric tea kettle. I found one that is reputed to be efficient, quiet, and has no plastic
parts.
The breakaway has broken up a bit. Now the three leaders are
Rolland, Jesus Herrada (Cofidis), and Simon Geschke (CCC Team). I’m not
grabbing a photo because that’s just too difficult. If these guys stay off, I’ll
have more chances later.
Damn, look at this sweet mullet!
Notably, that fan alongside him is almost wearing his mask
properly ... at least it’s covering his mouth. A lot of fans have totally fallen down here—you see them with their masks around their
necks, screaming their heads off four feet away from our heroes like fricking
idiots. Fortunately, the ASO race organizers are banning spectators from the
last two climbs. Finally.
The breakaway—I’ll tell you who’s in it in a moment—has just
reached the base of the first major climb, the Montée de la Selle de Fromentel
(which translates to “climb of the wheat saddle” … whatever, dudes). It’s a
beast … check out the stats.
Why are they mixing English and metric units in this graphic?
Kilometers for distance, feet for elevation? Look guys, either go one way or
the other. This is silly. Who is your putative audience? And do you even know
what “putative” means? Are you even reading this? Who are you, anyway?
Now they’re showing a pre-race interview from earlier today
with Richie Porte (Trek-Segafredo), who sits 9th on GC, only a couple minutes
back.
INTERVIEWER: You’re having a great Tour.
PORTE: I resent the unspoken “for a change” in your
sentence.
INTERVIEWER: No, it was just an innocent observation.
PORTE: Don’t give me that. You’re commenting on how for once
I’m not collapsing psychologically like a little bitch.
INTERVIEWER: Don’t put words in my mouth.
PORTE: You’re alluding to my previous years as a team leader
when my competitors destroyed me like dropping an anvil on a house of cards or
Godzilla squashin’ a crouton with combat boots on or droppin’ a goddamn nuke
bomb on top of an ant hill.
INTERVIEWER: I’m saying no such thing. But your recall of
Eminem lyrics is impressive.
The breakaway is two kilometers from the summit of this
climb. Herrada is falling off the pace.
OMG, Team Ineos loses two of its important support riders!
Okay, it’s not as bad as I thought. The announcers said it
was Richard Carapaz, the star from Ecuador who won last year’s Giro d’Italia,
but it’s actually just Dylan van Baarle and Andrey Amador. I’m not familiar
with these guys so they couldn’t be important, could they?
The American Tejay Van Garderen (EF – Education First Pro
Cycling) is dropped.
They’re showing an earlier interview with George Bennett,
another Jumbo-Visma domestique.
INTERVIEWER: What is your team’s strategy?
BENNETT: Obviously Ineos has to take the fight to us.
INTERVIEWER: It’s clearly a brutal course today. Are you
concerned?
BENNETT: I’m really just trying to survive this horrible
infestation of ear mites.
INTERVIEWER: Since when do humans get ear mites? That’s
disgusting.
BENNETT: Tell me about it.
Herrada takes max KOM points on the wheat saddle climb,
further distancing Herrada.
At the front of the peloton, Michal Kwiatkowski, probably
the best domestique on Team Ineos, takes a feed. I’m glad he’s still up there …
the way that his team leader, Egan Bernal, has been riding—that is, very well
but not brilliantly—we need him to have some support lest this Tour get boring.
To catch you up on what’s been going on since my last report, Team Jumbo-Visma has been doing an awesome job for Roglic, who has chipped
away here and there at Bernal. Roglic’s closest rival now appears to be
Pogacar, though youth and inexperience, combined with a weak team, will make
things tough for him. Pogacar’s best domestique, Fabio Aru, oddly bailed on the
Tour with no explanation. But Pogacar looks incredibly strong.
Huh, the stage leader now seems to be Michael Gogl (NTT Pro
Cycling), who must have passed the other three leaders on the descent. You can
see the stats of this next climb, the Col de la Biche (translation: “ascent of
the bitch”).
The motorcycle commentator is talking about Carapaz and
Amador just trying to latch back on to the peloton. So I guess my steephill.tv
roster is incorrect and it really was Carapaz
dropped on the last climb. That’s surprising … he’s normally so good. Ah, they’re
saying he crashed earlier in the stage.
Poor Thibaut Pinot. He’s barely hanging on the back of the
peloton … this is just not his year. (But then, we’re all having a pretty crappy 2020, innit?)
They’re saying Amador caught back up, so Ineos has five guys
in the group. But Kwiatkoski is visiting the team car for what appears to be
medical attention (and no, I don’t mean doping, though he is on Ineos). I hope Kwiatkowski is good today. Carapaz still hasn’t
rejoined.
At the front of the GC group, Jumbo-Visma is controlling
things with a pretty brutal pace, led by Robert Gesink.
In the breakaway, Rolland is drilling it, dropping his
companions (perhaps without realizing it).
We just have word from the NTT Pro Cycling team car that
Gogl is not related to the great Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. You might say
that the spelling gives that away, but remember that “Gogol” is just the
phonetic equivalent of the Cyrillic “гоголь” in our alphabet. It’s really too
bad this racer isn’t related to the author of “The Overcoat” and “The Nose.” I
was hoping finally to interest my younger daughter in this race. She loves
Russian lit and couldn’t care less about cycling … so my parenting work is only
half done.
As Gogl reaches the 2km to go point, Rolland has caught him.
I’m not sure how important this is because the peloton is only a couple minutes
back.
Phil asks Christian Vande Velde, a fellow commentator, if
the breakaway has a chance. “No,” Vande Velde replies. (I’m paraphrasing.)
Oh dear. Ineos is losing another domestique, the Russian
powerhouse Pavel Sivakov.
Rolland has dropped Gogl, thus officially dooming Gogl’s
breakaway dreams and his own. They’ve got 49 km to race and no way can either
of them last all by himself for that long. I guess Rolland is just going for
KOM points. Or maybe he hopes Gogl and Herrada can catch back up. (I refuse to
say “get back on terms” because a) it’s hackneyed, and b) I don’t even really
understand how it’s supposed to mean anything.)
Okay, the trio have come back together. Look at the crazy
ratio of support vehicles to riders. Such a nice gesture when this breakaway
almost certainly has no chance.
OMG, NBC just showed a flashback to a crash Rolland had on a
descent at some point in the past. Freaked my shit out. He was carving a curve
perfectly and his bike just slipped out from under him for no apparent reason.
This does happen. It happened to me back in May, in fact, and to two other
riders who happened to come by as I was sorting myself out. Sometimes the road
surface is just slippery. The crazy thing is, I never grasped this until I
became a 40-something and a dad. Prior to that, I descended as though nothing
bad could happen, and it almost never did. When I crashed it was because of a
puncture or something. How could I have been so naïve? Or did my naïvety
protect me somehow, in which case the danger wasn’t real and there was nothing
to be naïve about? I better exit this paradox before I lose my focus completely
and stop paying attention to the race.
Herrada has been dropped on the descent. Could he have seen
that crash replay somehow? Did his directeur sportif hear the commentary and
warn him? Or is his mom communicating telepathically?
Note the ticker at the bottom of that frame: Van Garderen is
over two and a half hours down on GC. Can you believe he took fifth
overall in the Tour, twice? That’s age for you. I can relate. My shoulder hurts. I
feel old. Damn.
Since nothing important is happening on this descent, and I’m
already getting dark, let’s take a moment to talk about the problem of
concussions in pro cycling. In Phil Gaimon’s cycling memoir Draft Animals, he describes how he
crashed in a stage race and knew he had a concussion, but also knew his
self-diagnosis would not be taken seriously if his helmet wasn’t broken. That
was the only criterion his imbecilic team medic would accept as evidence. So as
he sat in the team van during the drive down from the mountaintop finish, he
put his helmet between his thighs and squeezed until he cracked it. Why should
that be necessary?
A bigger problem is that riders don’t get checked out after
a crash … if they think they’re okay, they just climb back on their bikes and
resume the effort. The NBC commentators discussed this during yesterday’s
coverage, and showed footage of France’s last GC hope for this race, Romain
Bardet (AG2R La Mondiale), getting up after a crash in stage 13. He gets to his
feet, loses his balance, wobbles, and falls down. This happens a second time (I
think … unless they just showed it twice) but nobody notices in the chaos
around him, and he eventually gets back on his bike. (You can see the footage
here.) Bardet finished
the stage before his concussion was discovered. That is so dangerous, as the brain is really vulnerable after being
concussed.
Wow, that is all so
depressing! Don’t worry, we’ll put it all behind us when the final climb starts
and things pick up. It’s a brutal climb, about 11 km long and gaining 1,265
meters (that’s 6.8 miles with 4,150 feet for you patriots).
Bob Roll says, “We’ve just been told they have a tailwind.
That really benefits the stronger riders.” At first blush this seems like an
absurd assertion. Doesn’t a tailwind make it easier for everyone? On closer
inspection it would seem to only benefit the weaker riders at the back, since
the front riders are getting kind of a reverse draft since the wind is blocked
from them. But I guess if there were a headwind instead, the riders at the
front would be slowed by it, with those in back sheltered. So maybe it makes
sense. I’m freed to ponder this because the footage has been suspended by ads
for a while. I have absorbed the ads for Zwift, Rocket Mortgage, and Geico so
many times, I’ve developed a towering hatred for these companies and their
products and would never even consider buying them. But I guess it worked …
they managed to get their names up on albertnet, guaranteeing a massive digital
marketing benefit as they soar to the top of search queries. Well played, you
bastards.
Rolland and Gogl have actually extended their lead, up now
to 1:44. It’s tempting to think this means something, but the GC group is still
pretty large so clearly the hammer hasn’t gone down yet. These guys are still
doomed.
Oh, no. Guillaume Martin (Cofidis) has had a mechanical
problem and now Herrada drops back to help drag him back to the group before
the climb begins. Martin had a mechanical yesterday and lost a bunch of time.
Poor dude. It’s odd: these modern bikes have thru-axles, like mountain bikes,
which makes wheel changes really slow. I cannot imagine why they adopted that
technology.
Rolland drops Gogl as he realizes he better pick things up.
Do you need a photo of that? No, it’s really not that important, trust me.
The pace is going up as they tackle the hors categorie final climb, the fearsome Grand Colombier. Dan
Martin (Israel Start-Up Nation) is going out the back. Martin has suffered the
indignity in this Tour of having his past exploits ignored. At least twice, Liggett has said that the recent stage win by Sam Bennett (Deceunink – Quick-Step)
was the first by an Irishman since Stephen Roche in 1987. This is completely
untrue as Martin has won two stages, the most recent being in 2018. I’m glad to
have set the record straight here in case you have been watching that coverage.
Woah, Nairo Quintana (Arkea-Samsic) is getting dropped!
And now Bernal is going out the back! I can’t believe it!
Bernal’s teammates drop back to pace him. This is crazy.
At the front, Wout van Aert mashes the pedals for
Jumbo-Visma, to do maximum damage to Bernal and Quintana.
Bernal takes a bottle. Presumably it’s full of whiskey, to
start drowning his sorrows. He looks truly miserable. He’s lost a minute
already. Liggett says, “He’s living his own private nightmare.” Um, actually,
this nightmare is pretty public.
It doesn’t look like Pogacar has any teammates left. He’d
better hope he doesn’t have a problem. He’ll be getting ready to attack, of
course.
Fewer than 10 km to go. Van Aert detonates and heads toward the
back.
George Bennett takes up the pacemaking for Jumbo-Visma.
I just ran away for a minute to wake up my older daughter.
She is now miserable because a) she’s awake before 10 a.m., and b) I told her
about Quintana being dropped. He’s like her favorite racer, but there’s no way
I’m letting him marry her if he doesn’t get his act together. (Oh, wait, he’s married already anyway. I hope his family isn’t watching today.)
Yates attacks!
Bennett blows and falls back, clawing to try to stay on. Tom
Dumoulin takes over for Jumbo-Visma.
Yates is getting a pretty good gap!
Back in the chase, Bernal is really suffering. He looks kind of dazed.
Kwiatkowski paces him.
My online correspondent, normally very insightful (his last
comment being, “Ineos can eat shit .. fuk them”) says, “We don’t have great
hitting. We need Eva and Megan back!” He’s apparently multi-tasking at his kid’s
baseball game. Wrong chat, dude!
With 4 km to go, Jumbo Visma is in complete control. Pogacar
really needs to attack, unless he wants to wait until a later stage since he
has no team to defend a yellow jersey. Best bet would be to take time
(especially with the bonus) but not enough to get yellow yet.
Before this Tour started, my daughter predicted Roglic would
win the GC. “Having Dumoulin as a domestique is, like, the biggest flex,” she declares.
True, true. Look at the brutal pitches ahead of these guys.
Roglic attacks!
His rivals easily cover it. That was a bit premature. Kuss
moves to the front and shelters his leader to give him another shot in a few
moments.
And now Porte goes for it! It’s an awesome move!
Alas for him, he can’t make it stick against this elite GC
group. And now Pogacar attacks!
Roglic reacts immediately, but simply doesn’t have the legs.
Pogacar holds him off and gets the win!
The rest of this Tour could get interesting … there’s a time
trial coming up, and Pogachar did beat Roglic in the Slovenian national time
trial championship earlier this season.
Wow, what an amazing stage. Van Aert put up such a
blistering pace, he destroyed the hopes of two major GC threats in Quintana and
Bernal.
Here are the stage result and the new GC:
There’s a silver lining to Pogacar’s loss of 1:21 in an earlier flat
stage when he missed a split: if it weren’t for that, he’d have been leading
the GC for several days already, with no team. Perhaps it’s better to let Jumbo
Visma do an amazing job controlling the race so Pogacar can strike later.
Now Bernal finishes, looking desolate, like seven minutes
down. Poor kid. I hate Team Ineos and all, they can basically blow me, but
maybe it’s not his fault he ended up on a squad that, for all their doping
prowess, can’t adjust their strategies when they don’t have an unstoppable
wind-up doll like Froome to install in the field to pummel everyone to death.
They’re interviewing Pogacar.
INTERVIEWER: I’m not going to ask anything specific because
you’re gonna say what you’re gonna say anyway, so just say something.
POGACAR: Jumbo set the pace really high, and the heat made
it really difficult, in the end I was waiting for sprint, I am so happy to win
again. Jumbo was really prepared today and from my point of view there was no
reason to attack.
INTERVIEWER: You pronounce Jumbo with a “J” sound instead of
a “Y” sound even though it’s a Dutch brand. Why is that?
POGACAR: …
INTERVIEWER: Can you beat Roglic?
POGACAR: Today Bernal cracked, maybe one day I can crack, or
Roglic.
INTERVIEWER: When you say you can “crack,” do you mean that as
a transitive verb, the implied direct object being Roglic? Or do you mean in
the intransitive sense, that you could falter?
POGACAR: What the hell are you talking about?
I like how the Covid masks inflate and deflate as these guys talk, as they’re still catching their breath several
minutes after the finish. I also like how Pogacar always has shocks of hair
sticking out of his helmet vents. My hair used to do that, back when I had more
hair.
Now they interview Roglic.
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t win a stage but I think I see a
smile under that mask anyway.
ROGLIC: Actually, I never smile. I might be a robot. But
yeah, like I said, the guys were flying today, and yeah, so far we are doing a
great job in the Tour.
INTERVIEWER: You just said “like I said,” but you hadn’t
said anything yet. What’s that about?
ROGLIC: I was talking earlier to the stuffed lion that I
will be given soon. Just kind of making friends.
INTERVIEWER: It must give you great confidence having this
great team around you.
ROGLIC: Fans complain that I’m boring in interviews, but you
ask really stupid questions. Work with me here.
INTERVIEWER: You lost four seconds today. Are you livid
about that?
ROGLIC: For sure it would be better that I gain four seconds.
In fact, what if I gained 40 seconds? Four minutes? I’m so bored right now I
could cry … will you please ask something interesting, or get that mic out of
my face?
INTERVIEWER: Would you say this race isn’t over?
ROGLIC: No, it is not. Tomorrow is a rest day.
INTERVIEWER: Bernal lost several minutes, you must be happy
about that.
ROGLIC: Like I said, I don’t really bother with others, we
can only manage ourselves. In fact Bernal is dead to me. He doesn’t exist. He’s
a nothing, a lack, a cipher, a ghost, a spectre. He’s a sausage. He’s a muffin.
INTERVIEWER: Did you really just say all that?
ROGLIC: No, that bastard blogger is putting words in my
mouth again.
I didn’t get a snapshot of the interview but that’s a pretty
boring shot anyway. Better to give you a few pictures that show how badly these
guys have suffered today. Look at this crazy candid photo of Pogacar after his
victory salute:
You can tell Dumoulin dug pretty deep…
It’s also pretty clear Sam Bennett had a hard day, facing
the brutal climbs after picking up two more points over Peter Sagan (Bora-Hansgroe)
in the green jersey competition).
As for Sagan, he doesn’t actually look tired … just
deranged.
Here is the top twelve on GC. Note how Alejandro Valverde,
at forty years old, supposedly a domestique for Enric Mas, is managing to (selfishly)
have a very good GC result so far. Better living through science!
Well, that’s it for today. What a glorious stage. Check back
on Wednesday because I’m taking the whole day off work just to give you a
blow-by-blow of Stage 17, which promises to be another epic day as it tackles
the infamous hors categorie Col de la
Madeleine and finishes atop the (also hors
categorie) Col de la Loze. Be
there!
—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
