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Fortune favours the brave - Romain Bardet wins Tour de France stage by "racing from my heart"
CyclingSaturday, 29 June 2024 at 18:37
Romain Bardet had won on three occasions at the Tour de France, finished twice on the podium and won big races throughout his career. But none likely came close to the emotions and triumph felt today on stage 1 of the Tour. After announcing his retirement and that this would be his final ever Tour, the French veteran finally managed to pull on the yellow jersey after winning a dramatic stage.
“It’s crazy what happened here today, you have unexpected moments in your career and this was one of them”, Bardet said in a post-race interview. “I started this Tour without pressure because I’m not aiming for a classification. I’m completely myself again and that makes a difference. I saw that many riders were suffering, so I decided to attack. Frank then brought me to the front, he’s a great talent.” Great form for the DSM rider on the first day of the Grand Boucle. As UAE Team Emirates stopped pacing hard in the peloton and Visma took over, the Frenchman took the opportunity to launch an attack with 50 kilometers to go. This would prove to be the perfect strategy.
He bridged across to Frank van den Broek from the breakaway and the duo powered through together in incredible fashion. They maintained the large gap created on the climbs and in the flat run-in to Rimini they had enough left in the legs to hold off the fast approaching peloton led by Team Visma | Lease a Bike, Lidl-Trek and EF Education-EasyPost. They crossed the line together with 5 seconds over the group, but taking the victory they worked so hard for.
Half the victory was due to van den Broek's fantastic work for the Frenchman. “The way he rode on the flat at the end was phenomenal," Bardet commented. "The conditions weren’t great, the wind was against us. We were riding 46 to 47 kilometres per hour the whole time. This is an unthinkable scenario that nevertheless became reality. I followed my instinct by attacking at a certain moment. I have to conclude from that that when I attack, I’m racing from my heart and my racing instinct works out well.”
Twice on the podium of the Tour, he never managed to win in the Sky-ruled years. In the finale of his career, the 33-year old has shown once more why he is one of the sport's most popular riders. “Since the beginning of my cycling career, the yellow jersey has always haunted me. I was often close in the rankings and came close to the yellow jersey a few times, but it was never meant to be.” The day has finally come, at the least expected moment.
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- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024