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Tour de France
Well if, like me, you’re sick of hollywooding South Americans falling over at the slightest physical contact and pretending to be hurt until someone gets a yellow card, the antidote is at hand.
198 riders will shortly be rolling out of Leeds in the Grand Depart of the Tour (and I do suggest that it will be Grand in the “ee lad, that’s grand” sense as well as the original French), heading for 126km of pretending that nothing’s hurting in search of a Yellow Jersey.
It’ll be a different sort of Tour experience for a lot of British cyclists, normally we sit and watch the pro’s in the Alps and Pyrenees thinking “one day”. This year as they hit the likes of Buttertubs Pass Cote de Buttertubs, they’ll be on roads we know well and we’ll be smugly wondering why they’ve bottled out of favourite climbs like Rosedale or Chimney bank. It’s not the Yorkshire way to waste valuable tar and grazing land, winding back and forth across the countryside, shortest route to the top, that’s th’ticket. Those alpine climbs might be long, but they rarely touch much more than 10% gradient, Yorkshire holds some 33% gems…although the Tour has, possibly sensibly, decided that their global audience doesn’t want to see the world’s top riders get off and push.
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| Right past the door of one of my favourite pubs |
These first two stages will be reminiscent of the one-day Classic races with narrow roads, sharp climbs and cobblestones, so the favourites will need to be on their mettle and riding close to the front of the peloton; the Tour won’t be won in Yorkshire but it could certainly be lost there.
Those favourites will be Froome and Contador, and possibly Nibali as an outside chance. Wiggins is missing thanks to the ongoing rivalry with Froome and some inconsistent form due to Commonwealth Games track distractions.
