Well, here we go, another lap around France is about to begin, and it’s the only time of the year when you get to feel like a real pro athlete, because it’s the only month that the rest of the world is watching. The Volta a Catalunya or Gent-Wevelgem might be huge races for us guys, but to everyone else, they only care about the Tour, the Olympics, and maybe the Worlds.
Luckily for everyone watching, and us inside the race of course, I think it’s going to be really entertaining, with lots of chaos in the hills in the first week between the Classics guys, as well as the sprinters, and then the GC tension starting on stage 10.
I’ve already spent a few weeks with this year’s Tour peloton: in May, you were either racing the Giro d’Italia or were stuck up Sierra Nevada in southern Spain at a pre-Tour altitude camp. There must have been 150 guys up there – it was absurd. You’d go for a walk in the evening to make a phone call and bump into other riders all the time – you had no ability to escape.
In fact, the only way we could escape was when we descended from the mountain towards Granada in the morning. If you planned to start at 10am, you were guaranteed to be racing to the bottom with half the peloton. And by racing, I mean racing: there was an unofficial descending race to try and get the Strava downhill KOM from the ski resort to Pinos Genil, and it was messy.
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