Table of contents for September 2017 in Procycling

The ’17 Tour is growing on me. The GC never quite ignited, save for Peyragudes. But the more I look back at the race, the more I appreciate its texture and complexity. Sometimes a Tour improves with age, like wine and cycling journalists. I like Chris Froome. He’s a great athlete and intelligent company. I even have a soft spot for his style of pedalling – there’s a rhythmic spiky angularity to it which is more jazz than classical but that’s the thing about cycling and music – there’s room for everyone. However, I find Sky’s tactics boring and Froome’s detachment frustrating, even if I understand why he rides and acts the way he does. Of the four Tours he’s won, I only really enjoyed last year’s in terms of…

Peter Sagan’s disqualification on stage 4 of the Tour has been chalked up as an egregious crime against cycling, and rightly so. The jury got it wrong in sending the world champion home. In the wake of the Tour, the jury president, Philippe Mariën, suggested it was time to have a commissaire behind a TV, watching the sprints for infractions in real time. That is the nearest thing we’ll get to an admission of a bad call. Currently commissaires come off the road into the pandemonium of a finish and then deal with the incident on playback. It’s a good idea to have a deskbound commissaire - the cycling equivalent of rugby’s TMO. But video evidence, as the Sagan incident showed, should not be the only evidence considered. The danger…

The build up and anticipation lasts months. For 11 months, I guess but it’s over in a flash, at least that’s what it feels like. Looking back, the Tour feels like it flew by. Maybe if you watched every kilometre on television you would argue differently but despite appearances, even when the peloton is flying along on the flat, the concentration required and intensity of the battle for position is like no other race and hours now seem like minutes. I’m sure if you’d spoken to me on stage 10, the Champs-Élysées seemed a distant dot on the horizon. The 2017 Tour was an incredible rollercoaster ride of ups and downs for me and my team and dramatic at every turn in both positive and negative ways. As a team…

My last memories of my first Tour might not be the best ones. I finished the race in a lot of pain after possibly the silliest crash of my career, during the time trial in Marseille. I got through the technical part of the descent OK, but I came in too fast to a less dangerous bend further down. My front end slipped out and I went into the barriers. So I started the last stage with a big bruise in the groin, and bleeding out of various bits of arm and leg; then I had mechanical trouble on the Champs Elysées and was off the back. A hard end to a good Tour. One more hard memory: I didn’t think I would see the end of the Galibier stage.…

Among the thousands of spectators in Düsseldorf for the _irst stage of the 2017 Tour, some parties had broken out. Under the Oberkasseler bridge, a group of young German fans sat in camping chairs behind the rows of spectators, quite unable to see any of the action but able to concentrate on drinking beer and singing loudly. A few hundred metres further on, the Nils Politt fan club, on a day trip over from Politt’s home city of Cologne, had put more thought into their day’s celebrations: they’d brought a couple of gazebos, which they’d pitched right on the barriers, and several crates of beer. Even by midafternoon, the empties were stacked high. One or two looked as if they might not make it to 5:36pm, Politt’s start time. But…

Longwy sits at the far northeastern corner of France, nestled into an undulation of the Franco-Belgian border. It’s a frontier town in almost every direction, Belgium to the north, Luxembourg to the east; it also sits at the northern end of a narrow panhandle of the Meurthe-et-Moselle département, between Meuse, to the west, and Moselle, which separates it from Luxembourg. Border towns often suffer from crises of identity; none more so than Longwy, which has spent much of its history being assailed from one direction or another. The most prominent feature of the town is the huge Citadelle, a fortification built by the French after Louis XIV annexed the region from the Duke of Lorraine. The military architect Vauban built the Citadelle, one part of a chain of over 300…

Nate Brown, the Cannondale- Drapac rider, passed through the Vittel mixed zone wearing a visually unpleasant combination of Cannondale’s lime-green team kit and the red polka dots of the King of the Mountains classi!ication. He’d successfully defended the lead he built on the previous day’s stage. With a one-point lead over three riders - team-mate Taylor Phinney, Peter Sagan and Nils Politt - and only one point available during the day, all he’d had to do was make sure none of those riders got into the break, and the jersey would be his for another day. As it happened, the peloton continued to keep a tight leash on breakaways, and the day’s escape consisted of only one rider, Guillaume Van Keirsbulck of Wanty-Groupe Gobert. It was July 4, Independence Day,…

By the time the Tour had reached the vineyards of France’s Grand Est, it was clear who was the best sprinter. Marcel Kittel won thrice in the first week and would take two more by stage 11. “I’ve never felt better. I’m the strongest Marcel ever,” he said. What was the secret? Quick-Step Floors was operating a much more modular sprint train, hitting sprints hard, much later. “Matteo Trentin makes the call when to go to the front with Fabio Sabatini and Marcel,” Tom Steels explained after Kittel’s third victory. “Fabio is last man because of his experience but also his size - Marcel needs a bit more shelter. You saw Matteo coming up with 1km to go but it was too far. Marcel dropped back two places to get…

It’s possible Robert Millar was the _irst professional cyclist I ever heard of. I didn’t even know that he was a Tour de France rider, or what that meant; only that he was the face of Kelloggs’s Start, a 1980s breakfast cereal which covered its cardboardy taste with honey. When I got into cycling a few years later, I discovered that Robert Millar was one of the best Tour riders in the world. His best years coincided with my early years as a cycling fan, and I liked the fact that he was a climber. As I read and watched interviews and learned more about him I discovered he was a bit of a character. Stubborn, taciturn, moody, quirky and odd. Also, he was extremely funny - his columns for…

As luck would have it, the Movistar and Cannondale team buses are next to each other on the wide car park between Bergerac’s Allée Lucien Videau and Rue Pablo Picasso. This means the Colombian fans who are coming to the Tour in greater numbers every year can multitask. To the right, they chant Nairo Quintana’s name. To the left they chant Rigoberto Urán’s. Urán’s forename is too many syllables to chant e!fectively so they make do with his surname and claps. Luckily for the fans, perhaps less so for the sta!f of the two teams, today’s stage !inish is completely open. The Colombian fans cheer everything. They cheer the riders, they cheer the managers and they cheer the dude who’s carrying the laundry bags. And when Quintana himself responds to…

Depending on who you believed, the most incisive attack of the Tour’s first week came either from Fabio Aru at La Planche des Belles Filles or the journalist from Le Monde who documented the Italian’s ‘dangerous liaisons’ two days later. That Aru was ‘discovered’ and nurtured by the most notorious Italian amateur team manager of recent decades, Olivano Locatelli, was no more of a secret than the charge-list against that particular eminence grise: damning wire-taps and a period of house arrest after a 2003 doping investigation; suspensions for threatening and violent behaviour at races; a list of alumni that includes winners of Classics and major tours galore, but also an alarming number of riders who have either been banned or investigated for doping, including the most recent addition, Stefano Pirazzi.…

Warren Barguil took a worryingly wide line round the U-shaped interchange built high over the Ariège river gorge in Foix and defeated a most regal escape comprising Mikel Landa, Alberto Contador and Nairo Quintana. After stage wins for Arnaud Démare, Lilian Calmejane and Romain Bardet here was the fourth French stage winner and all were under the age of 26. “Fireworks. Whatever the terrain, the new wave of French cycling shines with a thousand lights,” Le Figaro raved the next morning. It reported on how FDJ’s Marc Madiot had sought out and warmly congratulated Ag2r DS Julien Jurdie on Romain Bardet’s win at Peyragudes and the praise Jean-René Bernaudeau had also heaped on Bardet. Nothing unites like success. But for the boyish Barguil, who is a Richard Virenque with ethics…

How is your Tour going? Koen de Kort: Not bad, not bad. Bauke Mollema: Yesterday [stage 9] was a hard day for the team with Alberto’s time loss. The spirit is really high and hopefully we can continue with that. KdK: For both of us, I think so far it’s been good but our personal goals are to help Alberto get as high as possible on GC and obviously that hasn’t really gone well. Personally, I’ve had a pretty good Tour so far, but I can’t be happy just yet. Has this Tour differed much from previous editions, both in terms of the route and the way it has been raced? KdK: At the start I didn’t find it nervous. But in stage 9 with the course and it all being…

Sunweb made a plan today and they executed it to - there is no other word for this - perfection. Michael Matthews was 79 points adrift in the green jersey competition at the start of the day in Romans-sur-Isère. A few days previously, he’d looked well beaten in the competition, and demoralised by the prospect of even challenging in it. By Romans, after picking up maximum points at the intermediate sprint and winning the stage, the lead had been cut to 29 and he was well and truly back in the hunt for the green jersey. It was built on a nine-man e!fort from the very start of the day, which isolated Kittel. “What a team,” he enthused in the post-stage press conference. “It’s just the belief in each other…

Even in the age of the internet, French newspaper L’Equipe remains the living chronicle of the Tour. A copy is given to journalists every day in the start village, and the routine of poring over the cycling pages with a morning co!fee is an essential of covering the Tour. Their journalists are royalty - they have access that other outlets can only dream of, and their tables in the press centre, in prime position in front of one of the sets of television screens piping live coverage through, are reserved. The cycling coverage is not quite blanket. Time was when the front cover was the Tour every day in July, but football takes precedence on quiet days. However, with young French riders doing well, it was a good year for…

IMAGES GETTY IMAGES THE GUARDIAN William Fotheringham It is when you turn to Team Sky that Froome’s triumph becomes complicated. Four wins is a massive achievement. There should be huge excitement around a feat that places a rider in the same bracket as Hinault, Merckx, Indurain and Anquetil, but that was hard to detect here. “He’s the victim of Sky’s image,” says Jean Montois, who has covered 35 Tours for AFP. “After Wiggins, everyone emphasised the dehumanised side of Sky but Froome has everything that should make him popular: he’s polite, he’s fair play, he makes an effort to talk French. “The public doesn’t like a team that crushes everyone else. If he had lost one of his Tours by 15sec, he’d be very popular.” The questions regarding Team Sky…

At the summit of the Col d’Izoard there was a smattering of people. A few hundred had ventured up early, five hours before the men of the Tour de France were due, by which time the crowd would be swollen by several thousand. It looked like a Tour de France stage finish, with all the infrastructure; all that was lacking was spectators, who were slowly filtering up the mountain. The big screen at the top of the mountain showed the race that had just started: stage one of the revamped La Course by Le Tour de France. Previously a criterium on the Champs-Elysées, it had shifted south to the Alps. Stage 1 was a furiously short 67.5km from Briançon to the summit of the Col d’Izoard Stage 2, announced several…

The Tour de France has just finished and we all watched Chris Froome taking his fourth title. The lesson learned for me is that he has at least two more Tour wins in him and that he will be unbeatable as long as Team Sky keeps the core team together and follow their plan. Most likely they will lose Mikel Landa to another team but they will find a substitute. And Chris will win the Vuelta a España this year too. No doubt about that. Chris’s wins have been quite different, from pure dominance in the first two years to racing with instinct and guts last year and this year a fairly passive approach. This year he basically won by staying with his main rivals in the mountains and making…

After four weeks, the Tour routine can be pretty hard to break some years, but this year it was nice to get back home, see the family and sleep in my own bed. I finished the race tired and disappointed that the race jury didn’t award me the super-combatif prize after being on the break for more than 1,100km. But I’m over it now. I don’t hold on to hard feelings very long. Plus, Warren Barguil rode a super race and took two beautiful wins. I have only respect for what he did during the Tour. When I was in Vacansoleil back in the day we used to crack the champagne open on the bus before the stage into Paris, but with Lotto Soudal, that’s not an option. This year…

By the opening day in the Alps, the high fives and hugs that had punctuated Quick-Step Floor’s first stage win in Liège felt like months ago. Or so it seemed to the media huddle gathered around Brian Holm, the team’s quotable sports director, in Serre Chevalier. There, the half-dozen journalists expected, perhaps hoped, to capture a story of bitter luck and the Tour framed as a cruel mistress. The team’s woes had started the day before. Philippe Gilbert was a DNS after contracting gastroenteritis. As soon as the stage started in Le Puy-en-Velay, the Belgian squad had been targeted by Michael Matthews’s Sunweb team, which shelled Kittel from the peloton. At the stage end in Romans-sur-Isère, Dan Martin lost 51 seconds and a place on GC in the crosswinds. A…

At a ceremony at the start of the 2017 Tour’s third stage from Verviers to Longwy, the 13th Prix Jacques Goddet was awarded to Stéphane Thirion, a journalist working for the Belgian newspaper Le Soir. The Prix Jacques Goddet is an annual award presented at the Tour for the best piece of writing in the French language about the previous year’s race. Thirion’s winning entry, written during his 25th Tour as a journalist in 2016, was a piece entitled ‘Monstrous, bald and windy’ (the original title in French works better as a play on words on the various names of Mont Ventoux). He was the _irst Belgian national to win the prize, following 12 French winners. During each Tour, the organisers of the competition collect a daily selection of published…

In 2017 La Planche des Belles Filles was what the French called a ‘dry climb’ - mostly flat all day leading to the foot of the summit finish. It was billed as the first real reckoning of the race. Indeed, Chris Froome told Procycling before the Tour there was “nowhere to hide” on the steep final summit, and that it was also a place were an important psychological blow could be landed. While Fabio Aru’s pre-emptive attack delivered the Italian hard-earned stage honours and raised his threat level, it was BMC’s decision to ride hard on the front for more than 100km that perplexed Tour followers. Surely it had been Sky’s role as yellow jersey holders to control the echappée royale that included Philippe Gilbert, Edvald Boasson Hagen, Jan Bakelants…

In hot and humid Troyes, Mark Cavendish should have been sprinting against the eventual victor, Marcel Kittel. But, well, Vittel. With Cavendish out, Dimension Data’s chosen man – or, rather volunteer – for the gallop was Edvald Boasson Hagen. In a powerful break all day in pursuit of a quixotic yellow jersey on the slopes of Planche des Belles Filles yesterday, now the Norwegian prepared to dust o_f his bunch sprint legs. At the end of the long stage, the South African team’s muscle memory made a decent _ist of the lead-out, in particular, Reinardt Janse van Rensburg, an apprentice lead-out man, learning from Mark Renshaw. It was the best of the day and took Boasson-Hagen deep into the _inal, messy kilometre. “Eddy’s not an impact sprinter, so he likes…

SERGE PAUWELS (DIMENSION DATA) “My intention was to get in the break and Sky would let it go. I was quite close in the GC and I was hoping they would give yellow away. I was in the first break.” 0KM ATTACK 1. Seven riders. Wanty chase. PAUWELS: “It was brought back and I thought f*ck it, it’s going to take a long time now. You could see everybody wanted to be up there.” 2KM ATTACK 2. Three riders. Brought back. RICHARD PLUGGE (LOTTONL MANAGER) “It was an incredible war. Right from the start everybody wanted to be in the break. We knew this would happen until the first sprint.” 3KM ATTACK 3. Three riders. Bahrain chase. DOMINIQUE ARNOUD (DIRECT ENERGIE DS) “We knew that we mustn’t miss the break and…

Florence Pommerie heads the medical team at the Tour. Among them, 10 doctors, seven ambulances, "ive nurses and bikemounted paramedics "ilter along the Tour’s length from the head of the commercial caravan back to the broom wagon. In total, it’s a team of 30. She leads them on the race and o"f it. Last year she set up a running group for the team early each morning on Tour. Outside the medical lorry that is parked outside the race HQ every day, she briefed the media on one of the big stories of the Chambéry stage: Richie Porte’s crash. The Australian had been stretchered o"f the Mont du Chat’s descent. But stage 9 had been action-packed for the medical team even by the Tour’s standards. Incidents included Robert Gesink and…

For "ive hours and 45 minutes it was business as usual. Team Sky at the front of a winnowing yellow jersey group, setting an unplayable pace. Then the turn on to the altiport runway at Peyragudes. George Bennett has a dig at 800m, then Aru. It’s a sprint. Froome is "ighting wildly but losing ground. Bardet kisses his "ingers in celebration. Five seconds pass, 10, 15, 20. The clock stops at 22. Froome is out of the yellow jersey and it is lost to a rival - a powerful and credible rival - for the "irst time in his dominion At the Sky bus the press swarm. This is di"ferent. This is exciting. It’s what the Tour yearns for. Relieved of jersey protocols, Froome emerges in regulation kit. Up his…

Le Théorème de Chapatte, Chapatte’s Law, is an old cycling saw, an unscientific but plausible-sounding algorithm for working out whether breaks in cycling races are going to stay away. It was named after its inventor, Robert Chapatte, a professional cyclist-turned-television commentator through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, who held that a break would need a minute’s lead per 10km remaining in order to succeed. Tell that to Taylor Phinney and Yoann Offredo – they were 30 seconds clear of the peloton with five kilometres of stage 2 to Liège left. Chapatte would have given them a good chance of success. Instead, as they dipped into and out of an underpass with 1.5km to go, the peloton eased up to them and passed by. Cycling has been breaking Chapatte’s Law for…

It’s not every day that an ex-Presidential candidate shows up at the Tour. John Kerry, defeated by George W. Bush in the 2004 US election and a lifelong fan of cycling, was a guest of Cannondale- Drapac. He’d followed a TT in a car before, but this was to be the !irst time he would follow a road stage. He looked relaxed, in jeans and a white shirt with grey New Balance trainers. He carried a black jacket, redundant in the hot sunshine of central France, over his shoulder and a maroon ‘invité’ badge swung around his neck, along with a pair of glasses. “It’s a beautiful day,” he said to nobody in particular as people half-recognised his face. Kerry hadn’t been the only American politician in France that week.…

IN PICTURES The Tour de France reached its literal high point on the Alpine queen stage between La Mure and Serre Chevalier. The route was staggeringly beautiful and obscenely tough. First came the relatively straightforward Col d’Ornon, then the complex and varied Col de la Croix de Fer. After that, the Col du Télégraphe and, in quick succession, the 2,645m Col du Galibier. An early break went - of course - containing 30 riders. But the race never settled down. Alberto Contador attacked on the Croix de Fer, bridging to the escape and joining forces with two Trek plants in the front group, Jarlinson Pantano and Bauke Mollema. Contador had consistently lost time in the big mountain stages, but he hadn’t given up, and stretched his lead over the yellow…

From the !inish line on top of the Izoard it was possible to take a path up to the impressively austere brown-yellow scree slopes that have made the col one of the most famous in the Alps. After a few minutes’ walk, the PA and generators are a faraway hubbub. The Tour had to drastically scale back the size of the technical zone for the Izoard. Usually it requires around 5,000 square metres for more than 100 vehicles. Here, there were no more than a dozen articulated lorries, a handful more white vans, a couple of fanzone screens and the podium. Team buses, the press centre and the race permanence - its HQ - were located elsewhere. The buses were down the mountain, and the HQ in Briançon. The high…

ASO took a gamble with the route of the 2017 Tour de France, and the general consensus was that going light on big summit finishes and time trials had not been a success. Chris Froome still won, and Team Sky still locked the race down on the mountain stages. ASO’s attempt to ignite a more attacking ethos in the peloton is, it seems, still a work in progress. However, there were chinks of light. Froome almost lost the Tour when a mechanical coincided with Ag2r La Mondiale asserting themselves on the middle mountain stage to Le Puy, terrain that in the past might have been neutral. Dan Martin, riding for Quick- Step, of all teams, was caught out in the crosswinds on what looked like a sprinters’ stage to Romans-sur-Isère.…

The last day of the Tour always has a di!ferent atmosphere to the rest of the race. The format is already di!ferent - laps of a city circuit. The clientèle is not like the rest of the race, either. Through the villages and provincial towns of France, the Tour celebrates the rural roots and traditions of France; in Paris, it’s more glitzy, with celebrities and VIP enclosures. It’s easy to stand on the dusty extended sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées, look at the VIPs supping champagne in smart clothes, their backs to the race, and silently wonder, “Where were you in the Massif Central?” So I wonder if they are paying attention to one of the most signi!icant events taking place on the road, the last race of Thomas Voeckler. The…

This year’s La Course with its new format was awesome to ride and I think it showed what the top women are capable of when the stage is really big. For me personally though, I wasn’t able to give the best of myself. The mind was willing, but the body was failing. On the race up the Izoard I just felt really flat. I couldn’t keep pace with Annemiek van Vleuten, who was so strong, so congrats to her, and I came ninth. I was really frustrated at the top. By nature, I’m really competitive and to be dropped by riders I know I can usually drop myself, isn’t just disappointing, it’s devastating. But on a climb like the Col d’Izoard, there’s nowhere to hide In Marseille, Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio caught…

On July 1 1995, the Tour de France prologue took place in the Breton town of St Brieuc. In teeming rain, the main favourites rode prudently, well behind the fastest time, set by Jacky Durand on dry roads before the heavens opened, except Chris Boardman, who would have been imprudently close to Durand had he not crashed spectacularly on the slithery descent back into town. Durand and Boardman are still at the Tour these days. Durand works for French Eurosport and Boardman for ITV4. But they’re not the only two individuals for whom July 1 1995 was a big day in St Brieuc. Elie Gesbert, the Fortuneo-Oscaro rider, was born in St Brieuc hospital that day. 22 years later to the day, Gesbert stood astride his bike on the start…

“Yeah, man. It felt like a dream, to be honest, out there. I’ve been reading a lot of Murakami, so that might be why I think that it feels like a dream.” So began Taylor Phinney’s mixed zone interview with the written press following stage 2 of the Tour. And that was before anybody had even asked a question. Phinney explained how a sartorially unusual scenario in his bedroom the evening before, with Cannondale-Drapac DS Charly Wegelius, had led him to go on the attack in the _irst break of the 2017 Tour. “So I did the time trial, took a shower in my hotel room and then walked out of my bathroom and I was completely naked in my room. And then Charly Wegelius walked into my room, and…

When Peter Sagan was disqualified by the UCI jury after coming into contact with Mark Cavendish on the finishing straight in stage 4 of the Tour de France, most seasoned travellers in the race convoy were in a state of disbelief. It was the best example yet of the requirement for cycling, and particularly its most high-profile events, to get a more appropriate collective of race judges. But it was also an example of a creeping political correctness that is in danger of making the Tour de France, the biggest, baddest, maddest race in sport, dull. Sagan, the biggest personality in cycling, was thrown out of cycling’s showpiece event before it had truly got going. And, as Sagangate developed, it seemed that it didn’t take much pressure to sway the…

There’s a spot two thirds of the way up the _inal ramp to La Planche des Belles Filles where photographers know to gather to capture the riders’ pain faces. It’s one of the _iercest gradients in the Tour and they’ve worked the spot twice before, in 2012 and 2014. For a perspective on its steepness, stand in the right place, about 150m further on, almost beneath the _inish line gantry and the photographers’ heads bob about, the rest of their bodies hidden by the curve of the hill. The heads were treated to a Belles Filles redux. Fabio Aru’s gaping visage came swinging around the right hand corner alone and in front after attacking 2km out. Within a minute, all the key GC contenders, and a couple of new ones,…

How’s your recovery going? I’m back training properly now. The last week or so I’ve been able to spin the legs on the turbo, but I’ve got the all-clear to do some efforts now. I’ve still got a bit of a haematoma on my hip, but that’s fine. I had the collarbone pinned five or six days after the crash and I had 10 days or so of not doing a lot after that. I let my hair down, for sure. How’s the mental recovery? It was tough. I’m happy the Tour is over. I watched some of the GC days but it was bittersweet. I was happy to see the boys doing well but it was painful watching it when I wanted to be there. After I pulled out…

It’s 6:30 in the evening at Station des Rousses. The sun is dipping in the sky, bathing the _inish area in warm light. Two hours ago, the road and its surroundings were packed - a small temporary pop-up town that appeared on the hillside and is now in the process of disappearing again. There’s still activity - stage winner Lilian Calmejane is sitting on a sofa reserved for interview subjects behind a TV lorry, and Chris Froome is walking back to his car after media duties. The Tour doesn’t stand on ceremony. Once the presentation is done, the race moves on with indecent haste. As soon as the _inal jersey has been presented, the small army of roadies who build the infrastructure of the Tour get to work. Barriers are…

On a warm summer afternoon in the Château des Vigiers golf hotel in Monestier, Dordogne, Yoann Offredo sits with his legs tightly crossed, leaning forward, fidget-spinning his mobile phone around between a long thumb and forefinger and telling Procycling that his experience of certain aspects of the Tour of Flanders is akin to Marcel Proust tasting a madeleine. “My favourite race, for a long time, was Milan-San Remo because it is a long race and very atypical,” he says. “But later on it became the Tour of Flanders. For me the Tour of Flanders is singular – it’s like the madeleine de Proust, it is the smell of beer, the public, the wet pavé…it’s an ensemble which is more than just a sporting event. It’s a work of art. Noise.…

I’m sitting in Greg and Kathy LeMond’s camper van in the zone téchnique at the stage !inish in Pau, and Greg is telling me that he’s a living deity. If you’d asked me at age 16, I could have told you that. “Did you know that I’m a god in Japan?” he asks. I don’t have time to say no before he explains. “The head guy at the shrine blessed me and made me a God. There’s, like, two million, but I’m one of them.” I’d come to talk to LeMond about his cycling career and being on the Tour, but conversations with Greg LeMond are all about the tangents. You may or may not get back to where you started, but it’s the journey, not the destination. Greg does…

I never came to the Tour with GC ambitions. I was focused on a stage result and the only difference between this time and the past is that I didn’t intentionally lose time. I was a bit worried because I dropped myself on the floor in Düsseldorf, then 20 guys put 20 seconds into me on the uphill stage which Sagan won. I was 14th at La Planche des Belles Filles, which was the first sign of life. I guess it had been eight weeks since I last raced and the race speed seemed to bring me to life. I always seem to struggle with the start of Grand Tours. I don’t know whether it’s physical or mental. I’m not saying it’ll happen this time - but I tend to…

The Tour de France has been slowly grinding Fabio Felline down. I’d caught up with him on the _irst rest day. The intention had been to ask him about his experience of being the Tour’s youngest rider in 2010. Instead, I got an insight into the descending spiral that can consume a rider as the physical fatigue piles on mental tiredness. “I don’t know what is wrong,” he said. “I’ve had stomach problems, but I have never felt the power that I need to be competitive in the Tour. “I know that this is the Tour. I know that it’s an important race and everybody here is 100 per cent. But for sure I am not at my level.” It’s a mystery to Felline what has happened. I’d looked at…

Michael Matthews’s second stage win of the Tour into Romans-sur- Isère capped the most impressive single stage team performance of the Tour. “Wow! Just wow!” shouted a euphoric Nikias Arndt as he warmed down at the Sunweb bus. “What a team!” Matthews’s lead-out man shouted into the gathering microphones before lowering his voice to explain how the squad had sensed a weakness in their key rival, Marcel Kittel, and then mercilessly targeted the German. Kittel was about 25 seconds down over the top of the category 3 Côte de Boussoulet after 20km but despite a convoy of Quick-Step team-mates supporting him, Sunweb massed on the front of the peloton and never let the incumbent green jersey back. When Kittel was dealt with behind, the team looked forward and reclaimed the…

At the uphill !inish between the timber-facade chalets of a Serre Chevalier village (there are 13), Chris Froome was already in the labyrinthine backstage area of access-controlled, steward-guarded gates, going through a routine no rider knows better, when Dan Martin rolled to a halt On open road, the Quick-Step rider spent 30 seconds bent double over his bars to get his breath back and took a drink from his soigneur. Like Froome preparing to go on TV, it was, by now, a daily habit to which he looked increasingly accustomed. He had, yet again, been taking on the yellow jersey group, pinching and prodding on the Galibier and provoking a sharp reaction from Sky. He’d paid later and been dropped, coming in 30 seconds down on Froome’s group, with Fabio…

Dag-Otto Lauritzen, the first Norwegian to win a Tour stage, in 1987, says that back home, they describe Edvald Boasson Hagen as ‘wood’. “He is really down to Earth; he is a really nice guy,” Lauritzen tells Procycling. “He is what we call ‘wood’. He is solid. It means you have your feet on the ground; not thinking you are special.” Boasson Hagen soloed over the finish line in Salon-de-Provence to win stage 19 of the 2017 Tour 30 years and one week after Lauritzen took his own stage win. The victory tied up a loose end for the Norwegian - he’d twice been third and twice second on previous stages, and one of those second places, to Marcel Kittel in Nuits-Saint-Georges, had been by 0.0003 seconds, or 6mm. (He…

It had been a long time coming, a Tour de France !inale inside a football stadium. For the best part of a decade, in fact, and a better, more !itting venue than the 67,000 seater Stade Vélodrome in Marseille would be hard to imagine. It started life as a race track before becoming a dedicated football venue. The Tour returned on the 50th anniversary of its last visit. Two arcs of black tar had been laid out on the pitch connecting the exits. One was for accessing the start gate and the second was for riders returning to the !inish. Tickets were free, and according to ASO 45,000 had been allocated. Midway through the afternoon, though, when Procycling ambled up into the stands it felt empty. It couldn't have been…

Javier Guillén, the Vuelta a España’s boss, would like to make sure Procycling appreciates how willing the current organisers are to experiment with the structure of their race. In the course of a lengthy interview, he it at pains to emphasise some of the race’s more imaginative formats. “In recent times, we’ve become the most innovative race of them all,” Guillén insists. “We were the first race to have a team time trial at night,” he says. That was Seville in 2010. “We were the first to start the race from an off-shore raft.” Galicia in 2013. Warming to his point, Guillén adds, “We were the first, I think, to have a stage that started from inside an aircraft carrier” - 2014 in Cadiz - “and the first to start…