The third pick of the year is a place and a day where many stories came together. Stage 11 of the Tour de France was a breathless watch and for that alone it was a thrill and memorable.
In a race where the big names and teams often dominate, it also gave an underdog story with collarbone calcification and depicted the World Tour promotion-relegation battle too.
Merci Sébastien Bosvieux. A cycling fan, he lives on the edge of Toulouse and in September 2024 he emailed Tour de France organiser Thierry Gouvenou with information about a wall-like road on the outskirts of the city. The Pech David hill sits above the Toulouse and is a popular gymnasium for cyclists and runners alike. There are different ways up, each sufficient to dynamite a peloton but the Chemin des Canalets on the western side is the hardest.
Gouvenou must know France’s geography better than most but not yet every road and he was receptive, keen to avoid processional sprint stages and the 2025 route with its start in Lille and passage across the north hunted out every climb going to enliven things. But Stages 8 and 9 to Laval and Châteauroux were flat and the thinking was Stage 11 needed to be spiced up and Bosvieux’s advice came in handy with the route redesigned prior to the presentation. When the Tour route was unveiled on 29 October 2024 were no details but it certainly looked like the Chemin des Canalets. Sure enough it was.
On 18 June 2025 Jonas Abrahamsen crashed out of the Baloise Belgium Tour’s opening stage, breaking his collarbone. News reports said he was likely to miss the Tour de France given the race was just 17 days away.
The Tour de France started on 5 July and Abrahamsen makes the front group on the run in to Lille when the race split, a clue he’d recovered fully and perhaps even benefitted from the intensity and heat of static training as part of his rehab.
Stage 11 is on 16 July and starts and finishes in Toulouse. After a long neutral ride out of the suburbs to escape the polynesia of roundabouts the stage starts. As you can see in the photo above as Christian Prudhomme waves the flag Mauro Schmid is out of the saddle, lips pursed, to launch the first move of the day. Next to him is Abrahamsen who goes too and they’re joined by Davide Ballerini of XDS-Astana.
The trio seem to dangle off the front with only a few seconds’ lead as a raging peloton chases and riders try to bridge across. The average speed in the first hour is 51km/h. Jonathan Milan in person has a go. Wout van Aert is launched by Victor Campenaerts. Others try but everyone cancels each other out as the trio keep rolling. As the peloton tries to sit up Fred Wright and Mathieu Burgaudeau slip away and manage to get across. The gap goes up to 45 seconds, then over minute for the quintet after 75km. It looks like things will finally ease up.
Only Groupama-FDJ’s Quentin Pacher’s home is on the route later in Castanet-Tolosan and he’s determined to feature. Others need to try too. EF want to defend Ben Healy’s yellow jersey for one last day before the Pyrnees and help mow down moves. At one point Jonas Vingegaard slips into an attack. And so it went on, an afternoon of anarchy amid the sunflower fields.
A quality counter-attack saw Wout van Aert, Mathieu van der Poel, Quinn Simmons, Arnaud De Lie and Axel Laurance away. They had the lead five in sight for much of the final 40km but couldn’t close the final metres, often just twenty seconds away. After Van Aert tried an attack Simmons made his move on the penultimate climb. The American’s move seemed to prompt Abrahamsen and Schmid to accelerate in a last bid to stay away from him.
On to the final climb of Pech David and Schmid and Abrahamsen still led by a few seconds. Van der Poel sets off in pursuit, the small road turned into the city’s liveliest stadium for the day with giant crowds. Van der Poel later said he did not realise there were still two riders up ahead, a surprise given for how long his group had the leaders in sight at times. But his pursuit prompted the lead pair not play games.
Behind Kévin Vauquelin made a move on the Pech David climb and this prompted a small group of the GC contenders to go clear. Among them Tobias Halland Johannessen who drifted across the road, felling Tadej Pogačar in the streets of Toulouse. This shut down any more attacks in this group.
Up ahead Schmid and Abrahamsen could not play games in the shaded boulevards with Van der Poel closing in. The two who had been away all day sprinted for the win, Abrahamsen the powerhouse, Schmid a finisseur with a track pedigree and it was Abrahamsen who won by a wheel.
Why the highlight?
Non-stop racing and if you were lucky to watch it live in full there were few quiet moments and it was visually appealing with sunshine and crowds too. It’s a pick for the day’s racing but tags other Tour stages which could make highlights too but are rolled into this.
To glance at the Tour route before it reached the Pyrenees was to imagine a collection of flat days but the route exploited every hill possible and while this left the sprinters frustrated it meant endless action. Event the sprint stage to Châteauroux was a surprise thriller with Van der Poel escorting Jonas Rickaert. Many of these days were the breakaway world championships with many of the world’s best riders in peak form giving it everything, this “Tour effect” is increasingly pronounced.
Stage 11 was exemplary with action from start to finish and it was almost a pity someone had to win as this meant the day had to end.
Dare we ask for more? One lament is we didn’t get an GC action on the day. Vingegaard slipping into a move did add a brief thrill and Pogačar’s crash without harm brought drama but this was all on the eve of the first big mountain stage and so the incentive for most contenders was to sit tight rather than risk a lot for only meagre gains. Still if, say, Matteo Jorgenson and Primož Roglič had made a late move to take time it would have been even better.
With hindsight
There’s not too much to extrapolate from this day, it felt like a party that just went well, the day had a buzz rather than deep meaning.
Still this was the last day where the Pogačar-Vingegaard duel held out promise. 24 hours later Pogačar won by over two minutes at Hautacam and the expectant mood was punctured.
Uno-X won promotion to the World Tour with 26,717 points, just 397 points ahead of Cofidis and Abrahamsen’s win here delivered 210 UCI points. As the chart above shows the team closed in on Cofidis throughout the season but in cycling terms they got Cofidis’ wheel in July and were able to outsprint them at the finish so the Tour counts for plenty. But the day was a qualitative statement, Uno-X scored throughout the season but won here they won at the highest level too.
There’s also a behind-the-scenes aspect to this. Uno-X have an excellent support staff, many from Sky/Ineos, and Abrahamsen’s recovery was in part thanks to being sent to see a specialist surgeon in Manchester. Plus there had been a lot of work on his nutrition so he could consume more carbs per hour than most. A recent Friends (subscribers) episode of The Cycling Podcast tells this tale well.
Oh, it looks like somebody had noticed this stage’s potential since the very presentation of the route…
😛 😛 😛
It looked promising from the presentation, the route is unveiled but never in detail.
It was surprising later in July when after several stages being hillier than a glance at the profile suggested plus the assumption that northern France = flat stages, and this stage was still talked about on the eve as a possible sprint finish, especially as the final Pech David climb was just 800m at 12% in the roadbook when in reality it has 18-20% on the way up.
They didn’t unveil it but the (ultimately correct) info was already around:
https://inrng.com/2024/10/2025-tour-de-france-route/
gabriele
Wednesday, 30 October 2024 at 12:29 pm
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Curious situation re:Toulouse, presented as flat but many insiders suggest it should have a good deal of climbing between -45 and -9 kms to the line, like seven côtes in 35 kms or so which could be pretty impacting if confirmed. Categorising it as flat might mean ASO changed their mind and eventually reduced the climbs or they stole another trick from RCS bag (slightly deceitful – while not false or wrong – info, in order to make the race less predictable).
You read it here first 😉
I had emailed our host when I found out we would be visiting friends in Toulouse as I expected a sprint finish. Not so, I was told – expect fireworks of an interesting sort. I suppose it ended with a sprint, but not without one hell of a battle! What an amazing stage and experience. Beautiful day, kids came home with tons of caravan swag, a couple bidons, and memories for the ages.
It’s so hard to capture the energy of the race and the riders on television and especially in the final 10k when the race is really on.
Glad to hear you all had a good time.
If anyone is thinking about seeing the Tour, give it a go if you can as it might be something 10-12 million people do every year but it still has its fun. And if you want any suggestions, advice etc, email in.
Went to watch the first three stages this year. We rode that last third a few hours before the caravan and had an amazing experience. Being cheered up the mini hills riding into Boulogne is etched in my memory.
Tangentially to this excellent highlight of the year, there is a good inside story to be dug out and told somewhere about the mismanagement of how and why Ineos have lost so many of their very good support staff as well as riders over the last few years. And all while still having a budget that, while no longer the absolute top, is hardly chicken feed.
+1 on that.
It is quite the mystery how such a well funded team, with such success, still with a number of top riders, can just drop to mid-pack. There must be a number of interesting stories behind the scenes.
On the GC side, I think it was a mix of bad luck (Bernal will likely never be back at the top, De Plus had a massive regression that I assume was health related) and a bad decision to believe Carlos Rodriguez would be a rider worthy of leadership in the Tour. I still think it was a good decision to let Pidcock go; he fits much better where he is. But the management losses have been harder to explain, and it seems like the rot may have been from the top. It will be fascinating to see if Dave B and G are able to turn the ship around, and if Onley ends up there the situation will be massively changed going into 2026.
I strongly suspect (and hope for the sake of his long-term health) that this will be Bernal’s last season. The big contract he signed just before his injury (the perils of long contracts) finishes at the end of this year. His current salary is apparently €2.5-€2.8 million per year. Would any team pay him 20% of that? And is he going to continue slogging away on that much lower wage?
Why so radical? Of course *not* competing in pro sport is better for anybody’s long-term physical health, but there are other aspects which might matter for him – beyond money, of course, which might also be relevant. He’s been in a clear albeit slow process of athletical progress which until now doesn’t look to have stopped: this factor alone is a powerful psychological prompt to go on in order to discover when you’ll reach a final top or pleateau, even if this point will surely sit well below your old self’s maximum potential.
It’s true that cycling’s current situation makes it unclear how value is negotiated on a team-athlete level, but I would feel more than confident that it’s well worth spending well over 600K a year for a rider who can currently make the top 10 in several important stage races where he went for GC, including the Giro (probably the 2nd biggest event in the sport), all while being quite visible and active, surely not à la Mentjes. Similarly, as he eventually went stage hunting at the Vuelta he duly brought home his deserved stage win, among other good results whether from the break or the selected GC group.
His Italian Autumn was also very good top-tenning 3 out of 4 races, including a Monument and Emilia.
And he’s born in 1997, still in his potential physical prime for a couple of seasons at least.
He might get stale or stalling, but for now there’s no reason not to bet he’ll keep his 2025 level at least.
Not that PCS classification are especially meaningful in themselves, but just as a quick reference for what follows, imagine that this season Bernal is among the top 50 athletes in the sport, top 30 stage racers and top 20 climbers for mountain stages. Now, around 60 athletes in the sport have salaries at 1m/y or more, 30 of them sitting at 2m or more.
The likes of Tao at Lidl, A. Yates at UAE or Hindley at Bora are all reported to have ~2.5m/y contracts.
Do you really feel current Bernal should be earning much less?
If all athletes barring the top 20-30-50 had to retire, the peloton would be quite thin. Maybe it would be fun. Or not!
If all athletes who look to have once hit a top and then struggle to come back for whatever reason should retire ASAP, we’d have lost some of the best moment in recent cycling courtesy of Sagan, Alaph, Gilbert, Cavendish, Boonen etc. Even an isolated peak from such talents is worth waiting for it. Of course, there are also different situation about which I’d agree retiring would be better except for the athletes’ and agents’ bank accounts, but it doesn’t look to be Bernal’s case, to me.
As I said, I only think Bernal should retire ‘for the sake of his long-term health’. When you have injuries that are that serious, stressing your body to the extent that he must be cannot be good for your health.
He is a good rider still. But unlike the other riders who are at his level, he once looked like he might well be a top rider. I’d have thought that this would make a big psychological difference as to whether or not one wanted to continue on a lower wage.
I was very happy to see him win a GT stage – and sad he couldn’t celebrate it properly (even though I was in favour of the protests). He totally deserves it. I hope he goes stage-hunting this year: no point in getting more top tens in GTs.
As for ‘the likes of Tao at Lidl, A. Yates at UAE or Hindley at Bora’, I think had their contracts ended in 2025, only A. Yates would still be earning anything like the same money, because he’s a very useful domestique, while the other two haven’t really gone anywhere since their respective Giro wins. Also, Tao and Hindley were signed because the teams hoped they had prospects – nobody is signing Bernal thinking that, so I’d imagine he’d earn less than them (unless he wants to become a domestique at UAE).
I think he’ll retire, and I hope he does.
Also, I’d be surprised if TGH and Hindley are earning anything like 2.5m euros.
When I said he wouldn’t be “at the top,” I meant the tippy tip top, like the yellow jersey. But he was still very entertaining to watch this year, even if he often fell short of his goals. I would be surprised and sad to see him leave, and I agree with Gab that he would be leaving a lot of money on the table if he did.
I had my hopes up for Mauro/Jayco on that stage … and now I am forced to re-live the disappointment!
Schmid deserves a lot of recognition for the stage, and for his season too. The result of the stage could have gone either way.
“Van der Poel later said he did not realise there were still two riders up ahead”
I’m going to call bullsh*t on that one. Unless he’s both chronically shortsighted and as deaf as a post.
Maybe. But something has to explain the way he – and others – rode that day!
It was a good days sport, that’s for sure. Despite it fitting into a ‘modern’ Tour stage template, I thought it delivered a rather old school spectacle. Exciting on TV and evidently at the roadside too.
An idle thought – we have ‘Roubaix’ days in the Tour, or Strade Bianchi days in the Giro. Why not a radio-less day, on a hilly circuit. I know it will never happen, but it does happen at the Worlds, so why not? It’s all part of the mix of our sport.
Just to say that “29 October 2004” in paragraph 4 should be 2024. Though it would be interesting if the TdF revealed their routes a couple of decades in advance, with no knowledge of what sort of riders might be contesting them!
I see the date has now been amended but I’m afraid I can’t delete my message.