All eight Tamagotchis belonging to the EF Education-EasyPost Tour de France team are now deceased, the team has confirmed. It brings to an end a turbulent two weeks for the team’s digital pets, which has seen the Tamagotchis die off one by one in increasingly heartbreaking ways.
The Tamagotchis were purchased at a colourful toy store in Lille prior to the Tour’s Grand Départ, for the exorbitant sum of €24.95 per unit. Escape Collective has confirmed with the team that there was no group discount negotiated, bringing the total to just shy of €200; pressed on this point, an EF spokesperson told Escape that “there’s no price on rider performance”.
Throughout the Tour, EF’s riders were often seen fiddling with their digital pets in the transitional moments before and after stages. Video clips surfaced from the team bus revealing a more tender side to many of the riders: Neilson Powless psyching himself up for a rainy stage by checking in on the Tamagotchi hanging off his backpack; Michael Valgren trying to fashion a way to fit his Tamagotchi onto his on-bike computer mount.
“Discipline is high, happiness and hunger is full,” Powless proudly said in one update. “It looks a little bit like a plant in a flowerpot.”
But the demands of a Tour de France are incompatible with sustaining digital life, especially when you are a rider on a team that has raced as aggressively as EF Education-Easypost has this year. Ben Healy won a stage and spent a stint in the yellow jersey; riders like Harry "The Truck” Sweeny and Alex "The French One" Baudin have delivered career-best performances.
Iain Treloar
All of that comes with added pressure and commitments outside of the race: time spent mingling with fans and media, compounded atop of hours outside of the bus, away from the life-sustaining needs of the Tamagotchis. Being a gotchi-Daddy, it seems, is a bridge too far while also being an elite athlete. And slowly, the team’s Tamagotchis began to die off.
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