Tour de France
Our Secret Pro needs a Secret DS behind the wheel … they chat Visma, Ineos, Remco and more.
It’s been a pretty mad first week of the Tour de France and the good thing for you all watching at home is that it still feels like it hasn’t really started.
The first few days were – as expected – chaotic, stressful and nervous. I actually think the crashes at the end of stage three were entirely predictable. There was no break so everyone went into the final fresh, and everyone fancied themselves to win. That forced everyone to get stuck in and inevitably crashes happened. It was a big shame for Alpecin to lose Philipsen as he was the fastest guy in the race. Still, Van der Poel had a few days in yellow so it’s not been a totally shit week for them.
Talking of the race for yellow, the rivalry between UAE and Visma is getting really interesting. Fuck knows what Visma are doing. They tried to flick Pogačar the other day by keeping him in the jersey, but then Van der Poel went into it by a second. Visma knew that Pogačar wanted to lose yellow until the mountains so they were trying to put pressure on him so that he stayed in the jersey, but I’m not sure committing so many guys to put pressure on him and his team was the smartest tactic.
They’re wasting so much energy with the way they’re racing. It’s like they’re in a boxing ring and they’re just throwing punches, hoping one lands. They want to force him into a mistake or maybe get into his head, but a guy like Pogačar can do it all himself anyway. You saw it the other day when he was exposed, he was still sitting there in the front row ready to go.
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