Section:GDN 1N PaGe:35 Edition Date:190730 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 29/7/2019 18:17 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Tuesday 30 July 2019 The Guardian •
35T
he most meaningful touch of the
2019 Tour de France was not the slap
Luke Rowe gave Tony Martin after
the German had tried to run him into
the gutter, leading to the expulsion
of both riders from the race. It was
the touch of hands between Julian
Alaphilippe and Egan Bernal as they
rode in the peloton towards Paris, a salute from the man
who had brought the race to life to the one who was
about to take the spoils : a moment summing up a race
that, over the course of three weeks, had rekindled old
enthusiasms and enraptured new audiences.
What, someone had asked me as I sat glued to the TV
one afternoon in the middle week of the race, do you see
in this? I tried to explain how a three-week Grand Tour
resembles cricket in its prolonged complexity but with
one big diff erence: imagine a fi ve-day Test, a 50-over
one-day match and a Twenty20 game being played
simultaneously, with all the diff erent priorities, internal
rhythms and contrasting techniques superimposed on
each other. And, again as with cricket, the elements play
a vital role in ways that are often hard to predict.
Certainly no one had envisaged the storm that cut short
last Friday’s stage to Tignes , in which all the narrative
strands had been set to explode at once. But, having begun
with one set of tears as a torn thigh muscle forced the great
French hope Thibaut Pinot to abandon the race in distress,
it ended with another as Bernal tried to hide his face from
the TV camera after removing the yellow jersey from the
shoulders of Alaphilippe, France’s other darling.
The hailstones and the mudslide that halted the race
after the riders had crested the giant Col d’Iseran ledmany to express their disappointment that the promised
showdown had been distorted by circumstances outside
the riders’ control but really this was just the Tour being
the Tour: the riders are pitting themselves against the
elements – mountains formed by volcanic eruptions
millions of years ago and the weather systems of a large
country – and sometimes the elements answer back.
As this year’s highest point, the Iseran was dedicated
to Henri Desgrange, the founder of the race, who saw
his creation as an ordeal from which only the strongest
would emerge. How would he have reacted? Probably
by expecting the riders to wade through the fl ood and
clamber over the mudslide before setting off on the
fi nal climb. No such option was available to Christian
Prudhomme, his current successor, as the riders raced
down towards a series of potentially lethal hazards under
the eyes of the worldwide TV audience. If Bernal was the
benefi ciary, then it was a reward for seizing the initiative
in the Iseran’s fi nal kilometres.T
wo days later, as the 155 survivors rode
up the Champs Élysées into a golden
sunset, the former pro David Millar
watched from his TV commentary
position and mused on the arrival
of a new generation. “You feel like
something’s happening,” he said. But
he wasn’t just welcoming the youngest
champion since François Faber in 1909. He meant
the feeling that this Tour had been characteri sed by
an approach based on risk-taking and inventiveness,
a philosophy embodied by the fl air and volonté of
Alaphilippe, who had worn the leader’s jersey for 14
days and engaged the aff ections of spectators around
the world before weakening and dropping to fi fth place
during the fi nal two days in the Alps.
Down at the fi nish line, Dave Brailsford was stamping
on any such suggestion. As he basked in a second one-
two fi nish for riders under his command, the Team Ineos
chief expressed a sincere admiration of Alaphilippe and
Pinot, who between them had raised hopes of a long-
awaited home victory. But his verdict was unequivocal.
In the end, he said, “strategy paid out over chaos, and
teamwork paid out over individuals ”.
While some may prefer chaos, Bernal’s personality
made the outcome acceptable even to those who
had dreaded yet another crushing demonstration of
Brailsford-inspired teamwork. Who
could not fail to warm to a young
Colombian who arrived in Europe only
three years ago but was able to make
his podium speech in Paris, without
notes, in English, Italian and French
as well as his native Spanish, and with
such evident modesty?
Two days earlier, having assumed
the race leadership, he was asked about
the pressure of wearing the yellow
jersey on behalf of a cycling-mad
nation. “It’s strange,” he said, “because
I don’t feel pressure. I really love to
ride the bike. I enjoy to be fi ghting with
these guys, the adrenaline, you know- to wait, wait, wait, then attack and go
full gas. For some it’s a lot of suff ering
but I love it. It’s not a space for pressure.”
The sight of a proper fl yweight climber winning the
Tour de France – in the tradition of Charly Gaul and Marco
Pantani – was a rare treat, while the race’s complexity
made room for great individual feats by the breakaway
specialist Thomas De Gendt, the sprinter Caleb Ewan and
two other climbers, Simon Yates and Vincenzo Nibali,
the latter the 2014 winner whose victory in the fi nal
mountain stage revealed another facet of the race: that
three weeks is long enough to ride yourself out of a spell
of poor form and to regain self-respect.
Whether this was or was not the best Tour de France
in history, or whether a great denouement was ruined
by the weather, is beside the point. In all of sport, there
is no human spectacle like it. And this was the most
gloriously human Tour of all.
A proper
fl yweight
climber
winning- in the
tradition of
Charly Gaul
and Marco
Pantani - was a
rare treat
Romance rekindled
Bernal blooms in
yellow after Tour’s
unpredictable
elements enrapture
Richard Williams
Football
Bale pulls out
of squad as Real
impasse lingers
Page 40 Cricket
England cast net
wide for Bayliss
successor
Page 43 ▲ (Clockwise from top left) Winner
Egan Bernal feels the emotion in
Paris; mudslides curtails stage 19;
Bernal and longtime leader Julian
Alaphilippe; France’s Thibaut Pinot
(left) withdraws in agony on FridayJEAN CATUFFE/GETTY;
THIBAULT CAMUS/AP;
MARCO BERTORELLO/
AFP/GETTY;
GUILLAUME
HORCAJUELO/EPAРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS