Tour de France Wrapup

The Tour de France, one of the world’s great sporting events, wraps up today with the largely ceremonial final stage ending with a final sprint finish in Paris. The Tour consists of 21 individual races over 23 days and covers nearly 2,200 miles, averaging over 100 miles a day, over all types of terrain and in all sorts of weather conditions.  Simply winning a single stage in the Tour is a life-changing event for a cyclist. As an example of the endurance of any of these riders who simply finish the race today, consider this year’s Stage 9 which started out on the flats in scorching heat and ended nearly 115 miles later with a mountaintop finish in plummeting temperatures and a driving hailstorm.

Britain’s Chris Froome is set to win the yellow jersey that comes with the lowest combined time in all 21 stages with Frenchman Roman Bardet lifting French spirits with a second place finish and Columbian Nairo Quintana filling out the podium in third place.  This will be Froome’s second win in a row and third in the last four years, having crashed out of the race as defending champion in 2014. Peter Sagan will win the green jersey for the rider who has won the most points in the race with a record-breaking total. Points are awarded for various intermediate and final sprints and intermediate and final mountain climbs within each individual stage.  Rafael Majka will win the polka-dot jersey for winning the most mountain climbing points and the Movistar team that includes the aforementioned Quintana will take the overall team title for lowest combined time for the entire team.

Froome and his Sky team domestiques (riders basically there to assist Froome along the way) dominated the race for the most part, continually setting the pace and protecting Froome once he got the lead. The most bizarre incident occurred on Stage 12 where overwhelming crowds on the Mont Ventoux finish forced a motorbike to stop short which caused a cascade crash of three riders including Froome and second place Bauke Mollema behind the motorbike. Froome’s bike was broken and with no teammate or team car to provide another, he simply started running up the mountain and finished a minute and a half behind his main rivals, handing the lead of the race to Mollema who was able to get on his bike and continue. But Tour officials decided not to penalize Froome for the accident and essentially froze the times of the riders at the point the accident took place, much to the disappointment of Mollema. Bad luck continued to follow Mollema who was solidly in second place overall when he crashed on a treacherous descent on the third to last stage of the race and dropped to ninth with no chance of reaching the podium in Paris.

This year the Tour backloaded the mountains stages in order to make the outcome in doubt as long as possible and it really worked. Although Froome did build a relatively safe lead, the second and third place finishers actually changed hands on both final mountain stages before heading to Paris. As usual the TV coverage is part bicycle race and part video tour of France and, despite the terrible terrorist atrocities France has endured, the crowds still came out in force – a testament to the enduring popularity of this incredible race.