No more waiting, the Tour de France starts today and there’s loop out of Brussels with bergs and cobbles before a high stress finish and a presumed bunch sprint with yellow jersey waiting for the winner.
Tour de France Preview
This is probably the most open Tour de France since 2012 with a long list of contenders and pretenders. This much we know, picking a winner for Paris is at best test of epistemology and more truthfully exercise in story telling. Which rider seems the most convincing?
Tour de France iCal
Here’s a downloadable calendar of the Tour de France for your electronic diary or phone with brief details of each stage. There’s also a look at the TV coverage of the race.
Tour de France Mountains Competition Contenders
Having looked at the points competition and green jersey contenders yesterday, now the mountains competition and polka dot jersey competition. If the green jersey competition has been tweaked, this year’s mountains competition has had some big changes with the hors catégorie climbs becoming all important.
Tour de France Points Competition Contenders
Here’s a closer look at the Tour de France’s points competition and the contenders for the green jersey. Peter Sagan’s owned this competition for years now and he’s hard to see past when it comes to winning again. This blog doesn’t need to hype up rivals to sell the contest but we can still explore the points, route and rivals because there are a few subtle changes this year.
Team Victory Rankings
A quick look back before looking ahead to the Tour de France. Here’s the chart of team wins with a review of how the season is going for each team and some the issues around them. Whathever they’de done so far this yearm is important but July is the team’s biggest month with huge media attention for their sponsors.
Saturday Shorts
La Gazzetta Dello Sport reports that the men’s UCI World Tour could go from 18 teams to 20 with Total Direct Energie and Cofidis the most likely squads for promotion. It wasn’t that long ago that the talk, or rather the press statement, was for a move from 18 to 16 teams.
Tour de France Guide
Here’s the 2019 Tour de France guide. There’s a profile of every stage with a quick comment on the route. You’ll also find reference material on the race rules like time bonuses, the points scale for the green and polka-dot jersey, time cuts and plenty more.
What Makes A Grand Tour?
Once upon a time a “grand tour” was a term applied to the journey young noblemen would take around Europe to finish off their education, perfecting languages and learning new things. As a cycling term it seems only to have appeared only in the 1990s as a collective label for the respective tours of Spain, Italy and France and implies a three week race. But with women’s cycling building its own calendar, can the women’s peloton have its own grand tours in new places?
The Moment The Critérium du Dauphiné Was Won
Wout Poels has punched ahead for the stage win but behind Jacob Fuglsand and Emanuel Buchmann are ahead of the rest of the contenders. The photo tells us plenty about the week with the wet weather visible and an Ineos worker unleashed.