Tour de France breakaways have always been hard to get into, but now they are nothing short of a furious battle. In this year’s edition, the breakaway formations have been among the most hectic and unpredictable in recent memory, driven by a unique mix of terrain, timing, strategy and race scenario. Several stages have been specifically designed to encourage aggressive racing, with lumpy profiles featuring relentless climbing over short distances. For example, stages six from Bayeux to Vire and 10 in the Massif Central, offered plenty of vertical gain early on, naturally breaking up the peloton and creating fertile ground for a breakaway to form.
So, when we arrived at the ‘hockey stick’ profile of stage 16 — flat parcours until the towering Mont Ventoux loomed over proceedings, many believed this was a nailed-on sleepy-until-the-foot of the final climb kind of day. Especially given the iconic status of Ventoux, a lot of people (me included) thought UAE Team Emirates-XRG would peg a small (and futile) break and set Tadej Pogačar up for a watts-per-kilo demonstration up one of the most famous climbs in all of cycling, decked out in the most famous jersey in the sport.
With no categorised climbs other than the summit finish on the Géant de Provence, no hilly terrain to allow diminutive climbers to get easily ascend their way into the break, yet too challenging of a finale for a rouleur to survive, the prevailing belief about how the stage would play out, was another Pogačar romp, like the procession we witnessed at Hautacam.
It was anything but. Matteo Trentin, a veteran of the modern peloton, has seen a changing of tactics of modern cycling: “It was a super hectic day again, pretty fast”. The Tudor Pro Cycling rider was one of a number of his team who was active on the day, including Marc Hirschi and Julian Alaphilippe. The frenzied racing kicked off from the start and barely settled all day, it was like no one had asked the riders, ‘you know what’s coming right? 15.7km at 8.8% – save your legs for tomorrow’. But it was aggressive racing all day on an attritional day in Provence.
Matteo Trentin made the day's break to setup an opportunity for Julian Alaphilippe (Photo: Billy Ceusters/ASO)
In the end, despite Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Pogačar — exchanging blows on the Ventoux — swallowing up six minutes from the front of the race, and finishing within a minute by the summit, it was the breakaway and Valentin Paret-Peintre (Soudal Quick-Step), who won on the day. On paper it was one of the hardest stages to win for the breakaway. After 15 days of relentless racing, to get in the move in the first place you had to be exceptionally strong.
Cycling has changed a lot in the last 10 years. As the sport has become more and more combative, more and more riders have the strength to make breakaways. The competitors are going so fast that stages are not taking anywhere near as long as they used to. They can ‘burn matches’ early in the day and recover to battle for the finish, thanks to advances in nutrition science.
This has completely changed the way races play out, particularly in the breakaway formation phase. A team cannot simply control the breakaway by authority alone — so Nils Politt (UAE) found out today, when he was trying to literally command riders to stop attacking, to finally let the race settle. His pleas fell on deaf ears. His work on the front early on may have contributed to the breakaway’s win, as he could not peg it at its usual three-minute advantage that UAE like to play with, giving Pogačar a chance for a stage win if he is up for it.
Trentin also noticed the old school ways of racing are coming to an end, at the finish he said: “There is a bit of respect, but some unwritten rules have gone out of the window, to be honest. Even today, everybody stopped for a nature break, and some guys decided ‘I’m going to go’. It was not really nice of them.”
Politt showed obvious frustration at the lack of control, in a stage UAE clearly had ambitions to win at the start of the day. However, the way the race leaders go about monitoring these stages played a part in the chaos. UAE were being very picky with the kind of riders they were allowing up the road, which meant the pace was ratcheted up just by the nature of Politt chasing down moves. This in turn, meant the gaps to the breakaway were pegged at a handful of minutes, which on paper might seem like a great idea to control it for a Pogačar win. However, in this case it meant that the breakaway — and a chance at stage glory — was only a few minutes up the road. Just enough of an incentive for riders to try to bridge across. For a team to maintain a small gap for much of the early part of the stage, there is always a risk that moves to join the break can happen from anywhere.
Nils Politt was on a hiding to nothing trying to control attacks (Photo: Getty Images)
UAE tried too hard early on to hold the gap. If they had let a suitable group get away and establish enough of a gap to dissuade potential bridges, then controlling wouldn't have been as challenging. They could have won this stage without exerting any more effort than they did, just at a different point in the race.
Their strategy ultimately cooked Politt, who has been doing this brutal donkey work for two weeks, and they decided not to send anyone to the front to help the German. Breakaways in the second week of the Tour de France are a lot different to the first week and this was one that got away from UAE. They flew too close to the sun and were, if not burned, mildly singed by it — after all, Pogačar is the best rider in the world and their tactics didn’t harm his charge towards a fourth title, just the stage win on Ventoux.
The daily battle for stage glory is only going to intensify over the coming days. With Pogačar dominating the general classification, many teams have shifted focus away from the yellow jersey and toward stage wins. This has made breakaways an essential tactic for those without a GC leader. Riders, like Ben Healy, know they can’t win from the GC group, so they have committed fully to these chaotic moves, understanding that their best chance lies in opportunistic breakaway wins.
These factors have produced an explosive race dynamic, where almost every stage doesn’t ever settle. Trentin was asked if he thinks it will be a sprint or a breakaway win on stage 17. Almost jadedly, he replied: “I have absolutely no idea. I think there are only two teams that really want to bring it to a sprint, Trek and Quick-Step. And then all the rest [of the teams] are like as you have seen for the last 10 days, just chaos and completely bananas.”
Chaos, completely bananas, and great to watch.
