For once Team Ineos, formerly Team Sky, may not have it all their own way at the Tour de France. The absence of Chris Froome, the speculation over the defending champion Geraint Thomas’s form and the youth and inexperience of Egan Bernal is fuelling a sense of expectation and uncertainty as the opening stage of the 2019 Tour sets off from Brussels on Saturday.
The last time Froome was absent, after crashing out during the opening stages of the 2014 Tour, the peloton’s wily coyote, the Sicilian Vincenzo Nibali, took the race apart on a pivotal stage over the cobblestones of northern France before applying the coup de grace in the Alps. Thomas, then acting as Froome’s stand-in, faded to become merely an also ran, finishing the Tour almost an hour behind the Italian.
Things are different now, of course. Thomas is the defending Tour champion and what was once the ominous black and blue of Team Sky has morphed into the ominous black and burgundy of Team Ineos. Plus ça change. Away from the Tour Froome’s severe injuries from his recent crash at the Critérium du Dauphiné may mean that, however hard he tries, he will never return to the position he once occupied, and there is no doubt that Bernal, the best of a generation of Colombian talent, is the coming man.
Luke Rowe, the team’s road captain, has no doubts over Bernal’s fitness for purpose. “Yes he’s 22 but there’s more to whether somebody’s ready or not other than a simple figure,” the Welshman said. “He’s old beyond his years and he’s already won three World Tour races.”
Thomas, meanwhile, appears to have woken from the winter slumber that saw him pile on the pounds as he celebrated his 2018 win a little too long and hard. Despite a different race against time, first to lose his surplus weight and then to recover from a nasty crash in the Tour of Switzerland, as he strolled through the foyer of his central Brussels hotel on Friday, he looked lean and ready to race.
Billed as the “highest Tour in history”, the 2019 race begins with a tribute to the five-times champion Eddy Merckx and ends with what the French rider Romain Bardet called the “hardest final week ever in the Tour”. In between those bookends, the 106th edition takes in the Vosges, Massif Central, Pyrenees and Alps with 30 second, first or ‘beyond category’ climbs, comparing with 26 in 2018. It appears very much a climber’s Tour but much will also depend on which team is controlling the tactical agenda and how the time-trial stages pan out. In both cases there is no doubt that the absence of the experienced Froome is a negative for Ineos.
The first race against the clock comes as soon as stage two, with the 27.6-kilometre team time trial through the avenues and boulevards of the Belgian capital. Bardet, true to form, is already resigned to losing time and then targeting a resurgence as late as the final week, when the Alps come into view.
The first summit finish comes next Thursday, when the sixth stage climbs the first category La Planche des Belles Filles, which the Tour is visiting for only the fourth time. On each of the past three visits the yellow jersey wearer after this stage has gone on to win the Tour.
A dominant performance from Ineos in the team time trial and at this steep finish, may leave their rivals facing an uphill struggle as the peloton crosses the Rhone valley and heads across the Massif Central towards the Pyrenees. A triptych of hot and lumpy stages, visiting Saint-Étienne, Brioude and Albi, fall before the first day in the Pyrenees on stage 12.
The only individual time trial, centred on Pau, prefaces two Pyrenean summit finishes, the first to the Col du Tourmalet, the second to the remote and wild Foix-Prat d’Albis. Two transition days lead to the decisive Alpine finishes in Valloire, Tignes and Val Thorens, that climax a Tour which is sure to have a high fallout rate as the mountains take their toll.
The route favours the Paris-Nice and Tour of Switzerland winner, Bernal, rather than Thomas but double-headed leaderships in the Tour do not have an illustrious history and have been characterised by as many bitter feuds as they have warm celebratory embraces.
The infamous one between Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault during the 1986 Tour was perhaps the most rancorous but the rift between Froome and Bradley Wiggins in 2012 was almost as intense.
If the Ineos duo are starting the Tour all sweetness and light, the same could be said of the Tour’s other double acts of Simon and Adam Yates at the Mitchelton-Scott team, Nibali and Rohan Dennis at Bahrain-Merida and the trio of podium contenders, Nairo Quintana, Alejandro Valverde and Mikel Landa, at the Movistar team.
Froome’s is a significant absence, not just for Ineos but for the other teams. In recent years so many of the other overall contenders have based their game plan around Froome and there is no doubt that his mere presence was a daunting factor. While there is now more opportunity there is also greater uncertainty.
Now he is not there the list of pretenders has grown from previous Grand Tour winners, such as Simon Yates, Nibali and Quintana, to hopefuls such as Jakob Fuglsang of Denmark, winner of Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Critérium du Dauphiné, Bardet of course and his compatriot Thibaut Pinot while Rigoberto Urán, second to Froome in 2017, and the veteran Australian Richie Porte will also wonder if this could, at last, be their year.
But Bernal, the Tour’s new kid on the block, is the outstanding favourite. The Colombian will follow on from the Ecuadorian Richard Carapaz, winner of May’s Giro d’Italia, if he is successful. But he will also have to survive the pressure cooker of the Tour, which is, as Froome knows all too well, a different challenge entirely.
