Tour de France 2019: 21 things we learned from confusing jerseys to ‘wheelsuckers’ via coffee in the Alps

As the different jersey winners stepped on to the podium in Paris, it wasn’t always easy to recall the moments that got them there. The climbers’ polka dot jersey was won by a sheepish Romain Bardet, despite having flunked the general classification and been first over only one peak, compared to Tim Wellens’ 12. The sprinters’ green jersey was won by Peter Sagan for a record seventh time, despite the Australian Caleb Ewan proving himself as the best sprinter with a hat-trick of stages on his Tour debut.

Most bizarre was the team category, won by that slick operation over at Movistar, who were so chaotic and divided that their near-total lack of sacrifice for the greater good caused their top three riders each day to clock higher than the rest. The image of Nairo Quintana stood on one extreme of the podium while Mikel Landa and Alejandro Valverde stood at the other told its own story.

Only the yellow jersey and the combative prize – rightly awarded to the excellent Julian Alaphilippe – made sense. Even the best young rider’s white jersey, won by Egan Bernal, was a reminder of some strange rules: at 25 he will still be eligible, three years after winning the maillot jaune. For the most part the subcategories have become confused and convoluted; the intermediate sprints serve little purpose beyond giving commentators something to say, while anointing Bardet the King of the Mountains just sounds sarcastic.

There are any number of potential solutions but here are a few. The team prize should be ranked by most stage wins, so that the impressive Tours of teams like Jumbo-Visma and Mitchelton-Scott are recognised. The young rider cut-off should be for those under 24 in their first two Tours. Intermediate sprints should be scrapped from mountain stages and given less weight elsewhere. Reforming the King of the Mountains classification is trickier as it overlaps with the GC so closely, but the formula must be broken if it doesn’t chuck out a summit-finish winner like Simon Yates. And we should give Movistar their own classification.

We learned a lot more about Egan Bernal this year, naturally, such as his serious nature as a child, the weight of his emotional investment in the sport, and his love for Italian gelato after living there for two years. One of the most interesting things he revealed was the dedication his father put into his training, following Egan around on a motorbike in the hills near Bogata day after day for hours on end. Everyone who knows Bernal’s parents says they are humble and hardworking, and Bernal’s success helped his dad to give up his job as a security guard at the local reservoir a couple of years ago. He won’t be going back.

Of everything that sprung from the Alaphilippe-effect, perhaps most important was that he made French fans feel something again. He made them believe that anything was possible, that Team Ineos could be beaten, that a classics specialist could win time-trials and climb mountains and maybe even win the yellow jersey one day. Those 34 years of hurt will become 35, and probably 36 and 37, but there was the sense that to home fans, that 14-day spell watching Alaphilippe wear the maillot jaune was a victory in itself.

There was a point during this race, deep in the Pyrenees, when Thibaut Pinot looked stronger than anyone, and it seemed that all the promise and expectation of the past five years would be realised in Paris. Then he banged his knee on his handlebars in Gap, and two days later he came to a stop in tears. Before the Tour, L’Equipe proclaimed it was “now or never” for Pinot, given the absence of key rivals like Chris Froome and Tom Dumoulin. If it really is now or never, they have their answer.

“I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this. I don’t understand,” Pinot told L’Equipe this week. “I’ve done seven Tours and had four abandons, when on other races, I never abandon. It only happens on Grand Tours, even though they are my races. To forget all this, all these struggles, only a win will do. A podium won’t suffice anymore. To forget all this, yes, I will need to win the Tour.”

Straight after the race Alaphilippe was asked whether he would be coming to back to the Tour next year with serious GC ambitions. He said no – he wants to concentrate on the Tour of Flanders.

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I assume the more cultured among you are not as ignorant as me, but I admit this caught me out. I was staying in a BnB on the fringes of the Alps, which was effectively just crashing at a slightly eccentric French woman’s house. She was very nice, and in the morning she prepared breakfast in the garden looking out over to the mountains.

There were a lot of bits and pieces on the table including a bowl but no cereal, and a big jug full of coffee but no coffee cup. This made for quite an awkward meal and she wondered why I looked confused, until it conspired that in many French homes coffee is consumed from a bowl. While she watched on, I hesitantly proceeded in what I assume was the correct style, lifting the vessel to my mouth with two hands like a medieval king.

Perhaps frustrated that he had lost his podium place, Alaphilippe took a dig at Steven Kruijswijk after the race, specifically the Dutchman’s conservative ‘wheelsucker’ reputation. “I would prefer to wear yellow for 14 days and win two stages than to have done nothing and come third,” he said. It was a bit unnecessary towards a popular rider in the peloton, and there was no obligation on Kruijswijk to attack Bernal on the final climb and risk losing his podium place after three hard weeks on the road. Even so, from a neutral’s perspective, perhaps Alaphilippe had a point.

Flat stages can often be mind-numbing but this year they were few and far between and the sprints at the end were often brilliant. There was a running battle between the big four alpha sprinters – Elia Viviani (one stage win), Dylan Groenewegen (one), Peter Sagan (one) and Caleb Ewan (three). There were livid reactions and chest-beating celebrations, proper tribal stuff, as well as tactical intrigue, like Ewan’s ability to surf rival wheels and catch the rest off guard. There were even a couple of surprise winners, like the victories of Mike Teunissen and Wout van Aert. More please.

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The 22-year-old Egan Bernal was the outstanding young rider, to the extent that he overshadowed some excellent performances from other relative rookies. Germany’s Emanuel Buchmann (OK, he’s already 26, but he was a revelation finishing fourth), Spain’s Enric Mas (aged 24, finished 22nd), and Belgium’s Laurens De Plus (aged 23, finished 23rd) were all exceptional, particularly De Plus in the mountains.

The long drives from stage to stage can be pretty intense sessions of trying not to fall off a mountain, particularly when the threat of landslides adds some jeopardy, so the various daily cycling podcasts were a good way to pass the time. The Bradley Wiggins Show was insightful and typically opinionated, The Cycling News Podcast was a little more nerdy with mixed sound quality, while The Cycling Podcast was excellent, hosted by Richard Moore with interesting insight from Francois Thomazeau, but the way it faded into discussion of a sponsor’s product for several minutes began to grate. The best to my ears was BBC’s Bespoke on Le Tour, which had the added entertainment value of Simon Brotheton’s passionate live commentary dropped in, and thankfully felt far less like a parochial cheerleader for Team Sky/Ineos than last year.

For once, Team Ineos/Sky had their control of the race loosened a little. If anything it was Jumbo-Visma calling most of the shots in the peloton, while at the same time winning four stages and getting Kruijswijk on the podium. They have built a brilliant and diverse team quickly, with a top sprinter in Dylan Groenewegen, an exceptional young classics specialists in Wout van Aert, the revelation that was Laurens De Plus, Primoz Roglic in reserve and could be adding the Dutchman Tom Dumoulin to front the Netherlands-based team. They will have the firepower to contest across all three Grand Tours for years to come.

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Second place at the Tour de France is no failure, of course, but Geraint Thomas made no secret of the fact that he’d come to the race to win a second yellow jersey, so the way he handled Egan Bernal’s win was a credit to him. He could have drifted off into the background and that would have been understandable, but instead he came to the fore when he must have been hurting most to lead the celebrations. Likewise, Chris Froome was similarly gracious last year.

There is the potential for the past three Tour winners to all be on the start line in Nice next year, and when the idea was put to Geraint Thomas he looked genuinely worn out just by the thought of it. “If all three of us are there on the start line – me, Froomey and Egan – jeez, we’re going to have some questions about leadership,” he said. Performance director Tim Kerrison’s response that they’d cross that bridge when they come to it seemed light on concern for the size of the bridge, and it’s potential to collapse.

While it was ridiculous to see Movistar win the team classification, it was enjoyable to watch their brazen disregard for one another play out on the road. There were a couple of occasions when Mikel Landa passed Nairo Quintana without even the slightest nod of acknowledgement, while the lack of any cohesive strategy between breakawayers and GC riders was impressively discordant. Most cycling fans’ biggest gripe is predictable racing, and Movistar, in their own mad way, were anything but.

One thing I’ve changed my mind about is stage 21. Perhaps it was because some recent Tours have felt a little short on drama, but I used to feel the road to Paris needed a sense of intrigue to be relevant, and that the neutralised procession was a waste of time. This year, however, it felt almost necessary that after putting on such a show, those riders who had made it to the finale were afforded the chance to celebrate their achievement. Paris turned out for the party, with thousands of yellow Colombian shirts brightening the roadside, and it felt like a send off worthy of the race that came before it.

The professionalism the race now carries is a far cry from the carnage the mad Parisian Henri Desgranges created more than a century ago, and in many ways what unfolded here was a reflection of modern life. The suspension of stage 19, because it’s not the 1950s and you can’t make riders wade through snow. The disqualification of Luke Rowe and Tony Martin, because it’s not the 1980s and you can’t punch someone in the face anymore. Like the real world, the Tour moves on. No one should be put in danger for this stuff. It’s just a bike race.

Weirdly, that fact had been forgotten in the opening two and a half weeks. The Tour had been such an utterly absorbing story as to make for a genuine piece of escapism. The tragedy of Pinot, The scandal of Rowe, the thrill of Alaphilippe. The battles in the Pyrenees were compelling and the hilly days were even better, designed to encourage attacks and delivering, like the charge of Thomas De Gendt on stage eight as he held off the chase by a few metres. Even the sprints had been fun, real showdowns between the power riders.

All of which meant when a landslide suddenly stopped the race, it felt like you’d been woken from a deep sleep by a glass of water to the face. The four emotional states that followed were confusion, realisation, disbelief and deflation. Three weeks had been crescendoing to this moment in the sky, and in a flash of hail it no longer existed. Few other sports are so at the mercy of nature’s random acts, and it was a reminder of a cycling truth: that no one ever really conquers the Tour de France, they just survive it better than the rest.

On the one hand, race director Christian Prudhomme and his organisers at ASO should pat each other on the back after the show they put on, because this has been one of the best Tours in modern history. Their plan to create a course for attacking racing worked, and when the snow hit the fan they reacted quickly and decisively, anticipating the possibility of a suspended stage 19 and scrambling motorbikes to the top of the Col de l’Iseran to record riders’ times as they reached the summit.

On the other hand, pushing right to France’s limits ended in chaos. “The highest race in history” was the tagline, but at 2,700m the air is thin and the environment is suddenly less predictable. Prudhomme would argue it wasn’t the altitude to blame for the storms here, and he is probably right; the reality is that the extremes of 40 degree heat and snowstorms are going to interrupt this race more regularly as the climate crisis deepens. This is a part of the world where most resorts have seen reliable snowfall days in an average winter shrink alarmingly over the past two decades, and some below 1,600m have shut down.

Ironically the Tour de France and its entourage of officials, equipment, fans and journalists like me contribute not insignificantly to the problem. The sheer volume of vehicles chasing the race around France is concerning and the hundreds of plastic water bottles, courtesy of commercial sponsor Vittel, which end each day piled high in bins at the press centre tell a depressing story in themselves. ASO has successfully tackled its litter problem over the past decade or so, but the Tour still chugs out an estimated half-a-million tonnes of carbon dioxide each race. Taking the lessons of the new, eco-friendly Women’s Tour of Scotland would be a good place to start.

Bar a few questions of Alaphilippe when he crushed the individual time-trial, the doping issue has barely raised its head in this Tour. Perhaps it was down to the way things unfolded, with few unbelievable moments and a relatively unknown young winner whose prodigious talent has been on the radar for years. We would be naive to think the issue has somehow gone away, especially given the blood doping ring uncovered earlier this year, or to think that the grey areas like therapeutic use exemptions have somehow gained clarity. But for cycling itself, it was a much-needed Tour de France free from controversy.

Team Ineos rode their first Tour free from controversy too. Perhaps it helped that they spent much of the first two and a half weeks under the radar, only later emerging with their first one-two finish since 2012. Anti-fracking protesters greeted the team’s unveiling at the Tour de Yorkshire back in the spring, but other than a sprinkling of boos along the roadside, the reception was overwhelmingly neutral.

It was telling that when Astana’s leader Jakob Fuglsang pulled out of the race late on with a fractured hand, his domestique Luis Leon Sanchez also abandoned. Clearly Sanchez had been carrying an injury, one so bad that he shouldn’t really have been racing any more, but he wasn’t prepared to leave his leader a man light. The same goes for the various riders from Lotto-Soudal who dragged Caleb Ewan up all those mountains, sneaking into the time limits, so that he could win on the Champs-Elysees. As Ewan put it: “They pull on the front on flat days, go so slowly on the climbs and then have to take huge risks on the descents to make up the time. They have to put up with me hurling abuse at them when he goes to fast. They have the worst job in the whole Tour de France.”

We knew this before, but now we know. Lots of talented riders have won Grand Tours at a young age and never gone on to fulfil their potential, like his own countryman Nairo Quintana, but Bernal really does have everything: the talent, the temperament, the team, and even the time-trialling skills to at least limit the damage where other pure climbers like Quintana have suffered in the past. He will surely win more races, more Grand Tours, more yellow jerseys – the fun bit will be finding out how many.