Calculated daring or utter delusion? A Tour de France like no other awaits

Of all the world’s great sports events, the Tour de France is the only one that goes out to its public. As the late Geoffrey Nicholson wrote, it is the only form of international conflict other than war that takes place on the doorstep. During a global pandemic, the edition that should start in Nice on Saturday is uniquely significant and uniquely risky. The conditional says it all: the 2020 Tour has been in doubt since March, it was postponed in April and it will be on a knife edge as long as it lasts.

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At the Tour, real life and the rarefied world of sport have always interfaced uneasily, but 99% of the time, no one is unduly aware of it. Every now and then, reality has intruded and raised questions about the validity of the event. During the second world war, the question of whether or not it should go ahead was hotly debated, while in 1968, the government made it clear the Tour should happen, to show that France had survived a spring of rioting. In 2016, the Bastille Day terrorist attack in Nice left the race looking significantly vulnerable, but with a huge police presence it continued.

The point the organisers have made, and will no doubt make time and again in coming weeks, is that the Tour has survived all these events, as well as Basque terrorists and grumpy agriculteurs. It has run every year apart from during the wars and it has always got to Paris on schedule, although in 1998, when the gendarmes arrived in search of banned drugs, that looked barely possible at times. This year, however, Covid-19 is on a different level of magnitude.

Amaury Sport Organisation, which runs the Tour, has issued strict protocols to teams. Riders and staff – limited to 30 in number – have to be continuously monitored for symptoms, at least twice a day. The race has a mobile testing unit. If two team members – riders or staff – test positive or show multiple symptoms, the team will be removed from the race. However, ASO and the governing UCI are silent about at what point the race ceases to be viable if multiple teams are sent home, or what happens if a more significant outbreak of Covid-19 occurs within the race, or if a cluster along the route is linked to the race.

There have been increasing infection numbers in France since lockdown was eased and the graph shows no sign of improvement. There have been cases linked to teams and within teams since racing started again on 1 August. On the plus side, there have been a fair number of races in France, amateur and professional, and no clusters appear to have been linked to any of them as yet.

Egan Bernal, Team Ineos
Last year the Colombian became one of the youngest ever Tour winners; still only 23, the Ineos leader is a precocious talent with victories in the Tour of Switzerland, Paris-Nice and Tour of California already.

Primoz Roglic, Jumbo-Visma
The former ski jumper is ranked No 1 in the world after netting 16 wins from March to October last year; at 30 he is in his prime. He's a late developer who relies on power and grit, in contrast to Bernal's youthful talent.

Tom Dumoulin, Jumbo-Visma
Roglic should be Jumbo-Visma's No 1 but in any case the Dutchman should be a key player. Still only 29, the Butterfly of Maastricht is hugely
experienced having finished second in the Tour in 2018 and won the Giro in 2017.

Thibaut Pinot, Groupama–FDJ
France's best hope since 2014 but hasn't always measured up. When the climber from Alsace is at his best he's a potential Tour winner but in 2019 he had victory in sight then dropped out on the penultimate mountain stage with a thigh injury.

Julian Alaphilippe, Deceuninck - Quick-Step
The 28-year-old became into France's new darling last year with a long and valiant defence of the yellow jersey, 5th overall, and two stage wins. Hasn't yet hit his scintillating level of 2019 but clearly isn't far off.

The organisers will be clinging to that fact and to the precautions that have been taken; these include multiple compulsory tests for those in the caravan before and during the race; teams functioning in bubbles, in effect living on their own in hotels; closed doors at start and finish, as well as on certain climbs; calls for all fans to wear masks. The final decision on whether the Tour reaches Paris will, however, be outside the hands of the UCI or the organisers.

In competitive terms, this will also be a Tour like no other. In normal years, the riders and teams hit July with several months’ racing and travelling in their legs; with only a few weeks in action everyone is fresh and the racing has reflected this, with rare intensity and high speeds. With no certainty over when the season will end, the only approach is to race as if there is no tomorrow; that will apply in this Tour, where every stage could be the last.

As Egan Bernal bids for his second successive win, the race on paper will boil down to a battle between his Ineos squad and the Netherlands-registered Jumbo-Visma. It has taken 10 years for a team to emerge that can take on Sir Dave Brailsford’s riders at their own game – essentially blasting away the rest so the leader can emerge at the chosen moment – but Jumbo have invested heavily and shrewdly and have built in strength and skill over the past three years.

Head to head, the two teams are pretty much equal, although neither is at full strength: Ineos have sidelined Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome while Jumbo have lost last year’s third-place finisher, Steven Kruijswijk, to injury and the Belgian mountain man Laurens De Plus to illness. The absence of Froome and Thomas will make for an even more open race; between them they have won as many Grand Tours as the rest of the field put together. Incredibly, Bernal is the only previous race winner in the field.

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As if the circumstances were not enough, this is a Tour route of rare toughness. The mountains are usually left until the riders have at least a week to warm up but the start in Nice means the race can go into the Alps as early as day two, with a tough mountain stage, and day four, with a summit finish. It will be a rude awakening for many and the need to be at peak form from day one may have been what eliminated Thomas. It is a route that suits the French pair Julian Alaphilippe (Deceuninck-Quick Step) and Thibaut Pinot (Groupama–FDJ), or Spain’s Mikel Landa (Bahrain McLaren), but it is hard to see beyond the Ineos-Jumbo battle.

In fact, it’s hard to see as far as Paris. For the next four weeks, the world of cycling and all of France will be living in hope, watching for the first positive test and the first cluster. By mid-September, running this Tour could look either like an act of calculated daring resulting in the biggest sports event of the year or it could be clear this was utter folly and delusion. The race will not come out of this unchanged but in that, it reflects the world around it, as it has done since 1903.