For the first time since he made his debut in July 2012, the Tour de France rolls away from Saturday’s Grand Départ without Chris Froome. Already, in the brasseries and cafes around the Grand Place in central Brussels, where this year’s Tour’s teams were presented to the public in warm evening sunshine, the talk is of who will fill the vacuum left by the four-times winner.
Froome’s dramatic crash at the Critérium du Dauphiné has opened up the Tour. Most pundits point to his fast-rising Ineos teammate Egan Bernal as heir apparent, at the expense of the defending champion, Geraint Thomas, but plenty of others – even the French – rate their own chances.
Romain Bardet, the doe-eyed, floppy-haired climber, more reminiscent of Eddie Redmayne than Eddy Merckx, is, as he is most years, the French favourite. Bardet’s mountain climbing abilities are not in doubt but his perennial resistance to improving his time-trialling skills means, with or without Froome, that his chances of success are slim.
When asked, Bardet cited no fewer than 10 favourites for victory in Paris and also described the final Alpine week of racing as the hardest he had seen in the Tour.
His team manager, Vincent Lavenu was keen to play down the impact of Froome’s absence. “It doesn’t change things that much,” Lavenu said. “Ineos is still as strong collectively. They still have Thomas, the defending champion, and Bernal, who’s a future champion. They have riders like Michal Kwiatkowski, Wout Poels, Dylan van Baarle, so the team is still full of big-name riders.”
The staging of the Grand Départ pays tribute to the first Tour win, 50 years ago in July 1969, of the Belgian legend Merckx and is the 23rd time the race has started abroad. The first stage will pass through WoluweSaint-Pierre, where the five-times Tour winner grew up.
If Merckx’s renown has since been surpassed by that of Eden Hazard among Belgian sports fans, his reputation among hardcore cycling aficionados remains intact and he is still referred to in glowing terms.
But there are some other anniversaries that the Tour is not so keen to commemorate. Twenty years ago Lance Armstrong took the first of his seven wins, seizing control of the 1999 race less than three years after being diagnosed with testicular cancer.
That success ushered in the darkest period in the Tour’s long and colourful history.
The ghosts of the Armstrong era still haunt the Tour, as does the whiff of hypocrisy that surrounds the feting of Merckx, who tested positive three times during his career, which contrasts starkly with the continued shunning of Armstrong.
Two decades after Armstrong’s first win many within the sport insist that there has been fundamental change while others believe it has been little more than a makeover.
The spectre of doping is never far away, as was hinted at by the recent Operation Aderlass scandal, which clouded the opening days of this year’s Giro d’Italia and remains an active investigation.
Armstrong himself, so well-versed that he could cite doping as his specialist subject, once counted Merckx as a mentor and close friend and will be podcasting at a distance throughout this year’s race. Yet even the American refuses to be drawn on the current state of the sport.
“I’m too far removed,” he told NBC recently. “I don’t have access, I don’t have intel. But I’d like to think that they’re clean.” As the Tour prepares to hit the road once more, those sentiments will be fervently shared by the race organisers.
