Tour de France 2019: Geraint Thomas may be reigning champion but Egan Bernal is race favourite

There are two things that you’ll hear a lot as the Tour de France begins in Brussels on Saturday. One: it is “the highest race in history”, a nice soundbite coined by director Christian Prudhomme which encapsulates the near-vertical nature of the course, with three of its five summit finishes rising more than 2,000m above sea level. Two: it is “the most open contest in years”, which might make for a more entertaining race even if it is a euphemistic way of saying the line-up lacks much star quality. And the more you consider those two key elements, the more likely you are to conclude that this is a race perfectly set up for Team Ineos’s brilliant 22-year-old, Egan Bernal.

Bernal grew up in Zipaquira, a small city near Colombia’s capital Bogata, 2,650m above sea level where the roads are searingly steep and the air is illusively thin. Few riders in the peloton will feel as comfortable as Bernal when the peloton climbs into the clouds around the Alps and the Pyrenees, where ultimately the winner of this Tour will need to take hold of the yellow jersey and protect it. The final three stages before look like a brutal Alpine test on paper, and New Zealand’s George Bennett said this week that they are even worse in reality. If Bernal could design the finale himself it would probably be something like this one.

Then there’s the strangely open field. Three of last year’s top-four aren’t racing – Chris Froome, Tom Dumoulin and Primoz Roglic – while there is a raft of ‘fallibles’, those riders who at one stage or another looked destined to win the Tour, except that now they are 28 or 29 and it still hasn’t happened. For riders like Romain Bardet, Nairo Quintana, Thibaut Pinot and Mikel Landa it is hard to see why this would suddenly be their year, and the same could be said for veterans like Richie Porte and even the 2014 winner Vincenzo Nibali.

Astana’s Jakob Fuglsang has had a brilliant season with wins at the Vuelta a Andalucia, the prestigious Liege-Bastogne-Liege and June’s Criterium du Dauphine – always a reliable signpost for who will peak in July – but he has only one pervious top 10 result at a Grand Tour and at 34 it would be a remarkable feat to suddenly win one. Britain’s Adam Yates could also challenge with the support of a strong team including his twin brother, Simon, and has the experience of finishing fourth two years ago. “I don’t really want to put a marker on what I want to achieve,” Yates said last week. “I just know I’d like to go better than previously and with the condition and consistency I’ve had this year, I don’t see why not.”

Of course there is someone else closer to home for Bernal to consider. Geraint Thomas comes into this race a little green having seen his season disrupted by injury and the long-running celebrations of last year’s victory. Does he have the mentality to become a multiple champion? Is he in the right condition to defend his crown?

We will get some of those answers unusually quickly. When assessing the route, the eye is drawn to the mountain inserted into what is often a flat first week. Les Planches des Belles Filles (the plank of beautiful girls) is the climb standing between the riders and the stage six summit finish. It has featured in the Tour on three occasions and each time was a big GC rider beating his chest over the line – Chris Froome in 2012, Vincenzo Nibali in his triumphant 2014 Tour, and Fabio Aru two years ago. It is the perfect platform for one of the overall contenders to lay claim to the yellow jersey, and it could be the first time the Thomas-Bernal axis is truly tested.

Their relationship is likely to make a fascinating sub-plot to this Tour, especially if both riders can challenge deep into the race. Co-leaderships are rarely the formula for success at the Tour de France. They tend to sow division within a team, and almost by definition it means each co-leader has lost their very strongest domestique to his own ambition. Bernal was the perfect foil for Thomas last year but now he has been stripped away, and if Thomas is to win this time he will have to ride past the talented Colombian.

It is not an especially wild conspiracy theory to suggest Ineos management already see Bernal as their leader, but did not want to cause a rift with Thomas and his close friends in the team like Luke Rowe by demoting the man who won the yellow jersey 12 months ago. Having Thomas as co-leader also serves to take some of the spotlight from the hugely raw and inexperienced Bernal. But the reality is that Bernal is in form, having won the Tour de Suisse last month, while the signs this season suggest Thomas is not quite at the level he was last time.

And the route is one that fits Bernal’s strengths. Thomas has moulded himself over his career from Olympic track champion to all-round domestique to outstanding climber, and he is more comfortable than most at high altitude, but the enormous mountain climbs which await, like the Tourmalet and the Col d’Izoard, are not his natural habitat. Then again, in Thomas’s favour is the organisers’ desire to break the monotonous control of Team Sky (now Ineos) with plenty of disruptive category two climbs peppered along the way. When things go off script, Thomas has the experience and all-round ability to react and counter-attack, more so than Bernal.

Who knows. Grand Tours are tediously predictable right up to the moment they’re not. They have a habit of lurching to life at the most innocuous moment, when the peloton is ruffled by a crash or split open by a crosswind, and this race feels more susceptible to those outside influences than most. Ineos’s strategy to field two leaders doubles their cards but weakens their hand, and the result could be that no one team is able to dictate the peloton like they did so relentlessly under the guise of Team Sky. This race will ultimately be won in the Alpine clouds, long after the domestiques have slid down the mountain. For Bernal, it is a home from home