For the opening week of this year’s Tour de France, don’t expect to see me — unless I’m bringing bottles to the boys — at the front. The last time I raced the Tour in the north of France, it was one of the scariest experiences of my career. The now-infamous “allez Omi-Opi” sign that caused chaos on Stage 1 of the 2021 Tour was a crash I actually managed to avoid. But there was another crash, shortly after that one on the same stage, that will forever remain etched in my memory.
The circumstances were ripe for disaster. Nervous tension in the peloton — already brought to a boil by the crash caused by Tony Martin slamming into the oblivious fan — was palpable. A yellow jersey was up for grabs for the stage winner, and we found ourselves hurtling down a wide road at 70 km/h. I still have PTSD from that crash. To this day, I occasionally shoot out of bed in a cold sweat, dreaming that I’m back in that moment.
Casual fans — and even people deeply involved in the sport — often think that a big, wide road is the safest type of road to race on. However, that’s only true under certain racing conditions. Often, I’d much rather be racing on a small, technical road. The field gets whittled down, there’s little room to pass or bump bars, and the only thing you really have to worry about is the one rider in front of you. On a big, wide road, the opposite is often true — especially when the road leads into a key feature of the race.
That’s where the peloton found itself on this stage. One hundred Eighty-four riders, at least 10 wide, jostling for position while traveling at a speed that would get your car impounded in a school zone.
Sure enough, a rider just in front of my team, trying to squeeze through a gap, crossed wheels with the rider in front of him — and the resulting crash was epic. I don’t know how I wasn’t injured more. I only incurred a bit of road rash, but as I got out of the pile of bikes and bodies, I felt more like I was watching the opening scene from Saving Private Ryan than dealing with the aftermath of a crash. Guys were yelling and screaming. When I turned around, I saw my teammate, Chris Froome, trying to pull himself off the ground, saying, “I can’t walk, I can’t walk.” If there had been a soldier among us trying to pull his intestine back into his stomach while yelling “Mommy, mommy,” he wouldn’t have looked out of place.
Starting the Tour in the north of France is akin to watching a train wreck. Crashing is inevitable, and stopping its momentum is impossible. The north is a breeding ground for crashes for a wide variety of reasons. Among them, ever-present traffic calming “furniture.”
The irony of traffic furniture in pro cycling is that, while it makes riding on open roads safer, in a race it amplifies danger to the maximum. It’s hard to see and it makes relatively straightforward roads far more technical. The consequences of hitting these features are often devastating.
Furthermore, the area is relatively flat with few features to thin out the 184 riders that start the Tour de France. It opens the door for a sprinter to take the yellow jersey and Jasper Philipsen did just that today. It showed both his class and that he is one of the greatest sprinters of this generation.
Those who have only raced the Tour in 2023 and 2024 may think the opening week of this race isn’t as stressful as it’s made out to be. Starting in the Basque Country in 2023 and Italy in 2024, the opening stages were far more physically demanding, which resulted in a more refined GC and a more settled peloton. This year, however, ASO decided to return to Carthage and put its opening week in the north. Crashes came in abundance today, and already big name riders have found themselves on the ground (Ben O’Connor) and even out of the race (Filippo Ganna).
Unlike in 2021, though, my ambitions lie solely in winning a stage from a breakaway. The odds of a breakaway surviving in this opening week — especially in the era of Pogacar, Van der Poel, Remco, and Vingegaard — are slimmer than a grade school’s class pet hamster. So my objective is to stay upright, keep all of my skin, save energy, lose time, and try to forget all the carnage I watch unfold in front of me.