They’d seen the forecasts, they’d felt the wind on their faces, and still the echelon was unavoidable. With 17km to go on the Tour de France’s opening stage, the peloton tore in two.
Off the front went Jasper Philipsen, the eventual winner in Lille, flanked by his Alpecin-Deceuninck teammates. Behind, the gap grew larger, unbridgeable in the end, with riders like Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step), Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) and João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates XRG) finishing in a throng 39 seconds down.
Some thought the first significant GC blows wouldn’t come until Wednesday's time trial. It took just one day for the race to open up.
Among those who missed the front group was 2018 Tour winner Geraint Thomas (Ineos Grenadiers). “It was super hectic, and a lot of fighting, stress all day,” he said, freewheeling back to his team bus.
“[I] just messed up going into that right hander. We knew there’d be some wind there, I had a lot of [Lidl-]Trek guys around me, and Quick-Step, so I thought, ‘I’ll be OK. We’ve got some firepower here if it does split.’ It did, and then the gap went, and that was it. It’s a bit frustrating.”
Even those who made the decisive move were left with their energy sapped. Last year’s green jersey winner Biniam Girmay (Intermarché-Wanty) placed second in the bunch sprint – "a good result," he acknowledged – in spite of his heavy legs from grappling with the gusts.
“I didn’t have anybody so I needed to do it by myself,” Girmay said. “Today, from the start, I already saw a lot of guys super nervous. I tried to manage, to not put pressure on myself, try to find the safest [place] possible. To be honest, I really knew from 50, 40km to go it would be echelons.”
Approaching the industrial outskirts of Lille, the wind ripped through the bunch at more than 50km/h. “This part of France is always windy,” said UAE Team Emirates-XRG sports director, Andrej Hauptman. Fortunately, his GC leader Tadej Pogačar ended up on the right side, crossing the line in 18th.
“It was a hectic day, just as we thought,” Pogačar said. “We were in the front and it paid off for us in the end. I’m just happy day one is done and we can move on.”
Sadly, for some riders, stage one ended earlier than expected. The Tour’s opening day brought two abandons – Filippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers) and Stefan Bissegger (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) – both of whom crashed at tense moments, before the echelon blew in.
British debutant Lewis Askey (Groupama-FDJ), similarly, was taken out of the action before the finale. How did he find his first Tour stage? “It was a bit of an anticlimax for me,” Askey said, having spun in 181st.
“I had someone ride into the back of me maybe a minute or two before it split. It was annoying because we had everyone who was supposed to be in our sprint train in the front. I was with them and that put me out of the race.
“It’s a shame because it’s stages like this that are the reason I’m in this Grand Tour,” the 24-year-old added. But he’s braced for more mayhem to come: “If I’m honest, the races that I tend to do throughout the year are the most scary, intense races like [Paris-]Roubaix, [Tour of] Flanders, and all the Classics, so this is what my speciality is. For sure it’s tense from quite early, but it’s kind of what I’m good at."
The Tour de France rolls on to the northern coast on Sunday, with a punchy finish in Boulogne-sur-Mer. According to the forecasts, the wind is going nowhere. Should we expect similar chaos tomorrow? “Yes, could be,” said UAE sports director Hauptman. “Maybe tomorrow is an even harder stage.”
