Tadej Pogacar emphatically won the Giro d’Italia this year on his debut (Picture: Getty)
There is a moment in the new series of the Netflix show Unchained which so beautifully captures the Tour de France it is almost poetic.
Thibaut Pinot, darling could-have-been of the romantically minded hosts had crested his final summit of his final Tour. The three-time stage winner, who admits he sometimes wished he’d been ‘less popular and more successful’ had lived the force of that popularity one last time.
This demi-God of French cycling had been forced to split a sea of heaving, swaying, adoring faithful to climb the Col du Petit Ballon, a throng having come to worship, hands reaching out, overspilling drinks blessing the ground over which he rode. The chanting, the cheering, the unfiltered, unbridled adoration – even in a sport as up close and personal as cycling, it was a rare and holy sight indeed.
But then came the moment so beautifully juxtaposed in the edit; the silence that followed. Thibaut Pinot had crested the summit of public adulation, and was left with nothing. With nobody. Alone on the descent, there was only the click of the bike chain to be heard above the fading ring in the ears.
If there was a way to frame contrasting clips of moving footage and hang them in a gallery, this was masterpiece material. The Transience of Hero Worship. The All or Nothing and the Gaping Absence in Between.
And so it is from this place of almost eerie calm that this year’s Tour protagonists prepare to emerge. From the silence and solitude of training, where no one watches and no one cheers, from the rarefied atmosphere of altitude camps, and into an air thick with expectation, charged with excitement. No acclimatisation to baying journalists, the clamouring demand for selfies, it’s a cannon-ball propulsion straight into the heart of the circus.
From hermit to hero, professional cycling is a beast of peculiar extremes. Handling those and the heavy burden of public anticipation and fevered frenzy that comes for three, brief, never-ending weeks, is almost as important as any of the physical demands of this bike race.
Jonas Vingegaard’s form and fitness is uncertain (Picture: Getty)
And the noise around the top four at this year’s Tour is like nothing in recent years. So accustomed are we to the hype of dual rivalries that this time, with four proven superstars vying for the podium, the volumes have reached fever pitch. It almost doesn’t matter that two of them should actually stand a step above the other half of this super quartet. We’ve come for the hype, and hype we’re going to have.
And anyway, it’s the uncertainties hanging over the two favourites that have nudged the volume ever upwards. Two-time defending champion Jonas Vingegaard suffered an horrific crash earlier this year that left him with a punctured lung, a broken collarbone and several fractured ribs. The psychological impact of a crash so bad it leaves you struggling to breathe cannot be underestimated, never mind the physical recovery that has taken up all of his pre-Tour preparation.
We simply do not know what version of the Dane will emerge over the next three weeks and, crucially, neither does he.
The other two-time winner to take the start, Tadej Pogacar, has had a much more favourable run-in, but could that be his undoing? The Slovenian hasn’t won the biggest race in the world in three years and he’s now attempting to do so as part of a sporting feat no one has managed in more than a quarter of a century, the Giro-Tour double.
The Pogcinerator won the Giro d’Italia by almost ten minutes but none of his big rivals were there and this wonderfully attacking, gloriously greedy rider may yet regret the efforts expended in early May, by the time the race rolls into Nice 11 whole weeks later.
Remco Evenepoel is riding his first Tour de France (Picture: Getty)
Then we have Remco Evenepoel who, at only 24, has already been world road and time trial champion and has won the Vuelta a Espana. But this is his Tour debut.
The most fascinating storyline of all could come from Primoz Roglic, a three-time Vuelta champion whose second place at the Tour in 2020 is already the stuff of legend.
Roglic was set for victory when his as yet little-known compatriot Pogacar shockingly stole the race from under his nose on the final time trial.
Since then, he has been forced to play second violin to team-mate Vingegaard but this year leads his own orchestra at Bora Hansgrohe.
Primoz Roglic is hoping to finally win the Tour de France (Picture: AFP)
With only three spots on the podium, at least one of these Grand Tour winners will lose out. And so far, I’ve only shown you around the GC carriages of the Tour hype train.
Mark Cavendish pressed pause on his retirement in a bid to secure the outright record number of Tour stage wins, we have Geraint Thomas and Tom Pidcock bringing the drama at Ineos, Wout van Aert comes back from his own crash injuries and the newly crowned bad boys of the peloton, Alpecin-Deceuninck, return to jostle elbows in the sprints for Jasper Philipsen and Mathieu van der Poel.
I may say this every year but I truly cannot remember a run-in to a Tour de France quite like this one. Crank up the volume, my friends. The party is about to go down.