As Pogačar and co. rip up the tactical rulebook at the Tour de France, there’s another set of unwritten laws that help determine how the race develops. We take a look at the Tour’s confusing – and often controversial – unwritten constitution... cycling
On the final climb of the final mountain stage of the 2003 Tour de France, Jan Ullrich finally looked capable of defeating his old adversary, Lance Armstrong. For arguably the only time during his seven-year-reign, the disgraced Texan appeared out-of-sorts at the Tour.
For Ullrich, so close to a redemptive second Tour win, the choice was simple because, as he put it after the stage, “fairness is everything in sport”. And besides, Armstrong had done the same for him after a similar incident two years before. We’ll forgive you for being confused by these. As we saw in the Pyrenees in 2003 and 2010, they are incredibly open to interpretation and often create more problems than they solve, but we thought that we’d take a look at some that you might find mentioned during this year’s Tour de France.They crash
In fact, mechanicals are considered by many to be simple bad luck. Contador attacking Schleck in what became known as ‘chaingate’ is the perfect example of this. One side of the argument says that Contador showed the ruthless instinct of a winner while others reckond that it was bad form to take advantage of Schleck's chain coming off. You shouldn’t have dropped that chain, Andy!
A collective sigh of relief will be released around the peloton when the yellow jersey's hand goes up. Riders of a team that has failed to make the breakaway may now quietly remove their radio earpieces as the team manager won’t be best pleased.Coming back from a crash, mechanical or nature break will require a racer to ride at a speed faster than the peloton. That’s difficult, so the rider will take a draft in the convoy of team cars to make things easier.
The whole situation made many question the jury’s decision, though others were simply frustrated by the lack of consistency around the enforcement of this rule.During the second stage of this year’s Tour in Denmark, a ‘barrage’ was called by the commissaries as Rigoberto Uran attempted to regain contact following a crash on a bridge, but not when race leader Yves Lampaert went down. Murky indeed.
Stage one of the 2020 Tour saw a downpour on roads that hadn’t seen rain in several weeks. The result was a number of crashes, and the decision was taken to neutralise a descent to the finish before the race started again on the flat run to the line. After that, the eight laps up and down the famous boulevard are suddenly a proper race again with attacks that are almost certain to fail, heading up the road before the sprint is won and the race is finished.
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