The Tour de France is taking place in 2020, against all sense
I'm tapping on a keyboard, about to tell you about cycling just ahead of the Tour de France, like I might any other year. I look forward to what has become a personal rite, except this year my brain is getting bad reception. The colors are off, the audio keeps breaking. The outlines on the picture are wavy.
It's nearly the end of August, for one, not June. In a "normal" year, we would be gearing up for the Tour at the same time we're preparing our Fourth of July plans, a time of year when hot days are novel and not yet endless. For two, I'm publishing someplace that isn't SBNation.com (if you missed it, here's pretty much what I have to say about that).
For three are the increasingly biblical calamities visiting upon our existence. Small details.
So yeah, it feels like a weird time to check back in on [/flips chart] "cycling" of all things, akin to restarting an idle conversation thread at a dinner party just after watching a married couple erupt in an explosive fight. I get if your head isn't fully here, because mine's not either.
I also don't know what else to do if not this. I've been writing about the Tour de France regularly since 2014. Then, my editors sent me to cover the end of the race even though I spoke marginal French and had never covered a live professional sporting event in my life. I made up the job on the fly, doing my best to make poetic substance out of the food, the country, the race and the riders. I muscled through the anxiety by convincing myself that everyone else around me was probably making things up, too.
Two things happened on that trip: 1) I not only did a passable job pretending that I knew what I was doing, but people also liked what I wrote, and 2) I fell stupidly in love with the Tour de France, a big, screwed-up, blessed sporting event unlike anything in the world. I learned that almost everybody is bluffing their competency to some extent, which the slapdash nature of the Tour only reinforces.
I look forward to writing about the Tour every year almost as much as anything, though this year it's difficult to square the joy I'd like to feel with the knowledge that the safest course of action would be to hit pause on letting a village of riders, team staff, press, grandstands and parade floats flit around France while the country experiences another spike in Covid cases.
The lesson I learned in that Alipine salle de presse seems much less quaint today when the world is nakedly begging for a plan. It's one thing to fool your bosses into letting you chase a bike race. It's quite another to host what the Tour normally boasts is "the largest annual sporting event in the world."
But here we are. I'm back at a keyboard, though in a stuffy Brooklyn apartment and decidedly not on a mountainside. The Tour de France will start in Nice on Aug. 29, and it will be a really good race if it goes the distance. I'm excited! Very cautiously excited!
So, cycling!
Yeah, cycling. If you've missed the season since the restart, or don't know much about the sport, here's a fast primer:
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There's a team called Jumbo-Visma that has either won or weighed heavily on every competition or stage thus far. They have arguably the best rider in the world, a 25-year-old Belgian named Wout van Aert, who won two big one-day races in Italy, as well as a stage of the Critérium du Dauphiné. He is capable of winning any race in cycling EXCEPT, perhaps, a long, mountainous stage race like the Tour, but he and a crew of other otherworldly riders make up the Tour's best team. They're in charge of shepherding the betting favorite for the yellow jersey, a Slovenian ski jumper-turned-cyclist named Primož Roglič.
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The team that has won the Tour seven of the last eight years, Team Ineos (formerly Sky), are still plenty powerful, but relatively wobbly. Surprisingly, they left Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas off the roster, two legends with a combined five yellow jerseys who have looked out of shape. Ineos still has phenom Egan Bernal, who won last year at 22 years old and made history. It makes sense to consider them Tour favorites until someone else proves otherwise.
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Having at least two dominant teams in the peloton could make racing even more wide open. There are plenty of contenders to watch outside of the two favorites (more on that later this week). The mercurial, melancholy French candidate (and thus, IDIPD fave) is Thibaut Pinot, who is currently at 15/2 odds to become France's first Tour winner since mercurial, melancholy French legend Bernard Hinault in 1985.
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This year's route does a great job mixing in punchier, hilly stages among the MEGA MOUNTAIN and the nap-fodder flat stages (more on that later, too). This should be a fun race to watch end to end. Hell, there are two Category 1 climbs just on the second day.
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One thing we hopefully won't see is cyclists going ass over teakettle. Sadly, that's perhaps the biggest story of the restarted season, and the most apt metaphor for 2020. We've had Fabio Jakobsen exploding through a barrier on a downhill sprint, Remco Evenepoel falling off a bridge 30 feet into a ravine, Max Schachmann getting left-hooked by a civilian driver on a purportedly closed course, and a string of crashes late in the Critérium du Dauphiné that affected multiple yellow jersey contenders, including Roglic and Bernal. They're all reminders that the world isn't safe even for people who do everything right.
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Oh, and regarding that global pandemic: yep, there are protocols in place. And encouragingly, cycling has so far avoided a major Covid outbreak since the restart. The Tour is multitudes bigger than anything else in cycling, however. Keeping this Tour safe may be akin to taking a trigonometry exam after just passing arithmetic.
Which brings us back to where we started: Anxiously excited and anxiously nervous about my very problematic pastime. The Tour de France has always been reckless, but limiting the damage to the tarmac this year will take levels of cooperation and organization that the sport has yet to display.
Whatever happens, you can follow here
I encourage you to subscribe to this newsletter ESPECIALLY if cycling isn't your thing. It should be clear by now that there is a lot more going on here than just skinny dudes on bikes. I won't throw you into the weeds. My objective is good ass blogging for everyone, by any standard.
Subscribe for free and you'll get access to preview content, as well as stage previews and recaps for the first four stages. There'll be scattered free dispatches throughout the rest of the race, too.
For $25, you get the complete experience — recaps and previews for every stage, as well as separate posts covering the Tour's funniest, most shocking and most heart-wrenching moments. It's a fair chunk of money, but it's also a fair bit of work that I promise will be worth your while. You'll also be getting a fairly exclusive product: As of now, I have no plans to continue the newsletter after the Tour. (An important note on that: you're technically signing up for an annual subscription, but I'll be shutting off billing as soon as the Tour ends, so don't worry about getting charged twice.)
If you need some convincing, that's cool. I recommend you check out this compendium that I made last year with my former SB Nation friends. Or just read what shows up in your inbox for the next week and see if you like it.
I will also be donating $5 from every paid subscription to Transportation Alternatives, an organization fighting for better cycling and transportation infrastructure in New York City. Their cause is dear to my heart as someone who likes to bike all over the city and has experienced far too many close calls. TransAlt wants to create a safer, more equitable city. That's a good thing, imo.
And that's everything I have to say right now, I think. I can't pretend I know exactly how this will go, but as we've learned too well that rarely stops anyone from plowing ahead at high speed. All I know is that this Tour will be among the most memorable in its history, and I'm here to blog the hell out of it. Same as always.