August 28, 2020

Let's have a Nice time: 2020 Tour de France predictions and Stage 1 preview

From Monday: The Tour de France is taking place in 2020, against all sense

From Tuesday: Your 2020 Tour de France rooting guide

From Thursday: The 2020 Tour de France stage watchability guide

Programming note: Tomorrow I'll have a Stage 1 recap and Stage 2 preview, likely in the same newsletter, though you may start receiving two emails from me a day at some point. As the Tour goes on, don't forget to send me your feedback about what you would like to see written and how you would like to receive it. In general, I'll try to spare you email pings.

For those subscribed for free, you have four days left until this newsletter goes mostly premium. If cost is an issue, just reach out.

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A disclaimer: Making predictions about the Tour de France misses the point. Yes, someone's trying to win the yellow jersey, but that's not why everyone is there, nor does it have to be the biggest reason we watch. We can invest ourselves in the green and polka-dot jerseys instead, but they're not the point, either.

Every team and rider has their own tailored, nuanced goals heading into the race. The rough idea is to go as fast as one can on a bicycle, sure, but many riders aren't even entertaining the thought of winning. And those goals will change stage-by-stage, until eventually, for many competitors, what they once thought was the point will be a far gone memory.

Effectively, to watch the Tour de France is to watch 176 individuals evolve into new people with each unexpected challenge. And in that sense, who cares what we think at the start? This is a snapshot of a moment in time, something to admire at the end of three weeks like an old photo. A way to emphasize who we've become by contrast.

Some of these predictions may be accurate. Many will be appallingly wrong. Whatever the case, this newsletter will begin to seem quaint in less than 24 hours. Don't take this the wrong way, it's important to take stock of one's head every so often. I just don't want to give you the wrong impression.

So much happens at the Tour, that even if we wind up where we thought, we're stunned by how we got there. Or need I remind you that last year's inevitable Ineos victory involved an icestorm in July. Despite appearances, the result is never the point.

Who will win yellow?

Primoz Roglic.

Jumbo-Visma is ailing after the Critérium du Dauphiné, where both Roglic and Steven Kruijswijk took hard falls. Roglic is still headed to the Tour as the odds-on yellow jersey favorite, but no one outside of the team has confirmed he's 100 percent. And Kruijswijk, who would have been a top lieutenant, will stay home.

And yet, there's no one else I feel nearly as confident about. That's how good Roglic and Jumbo-Visma have been.

Roglic likely would have won the Dauphiné if he hadn't abandoned ahead of the final stage (which his teammate Sepp Kuss won with a solo effort), and he dominated the three-day Tour de l'Ain just a week earlier, winning two stages and the overall. In both instances, he bested his primary Tour competition: Last year's winner, Egan Bernal.

Betting against Ineos may seem dumb, but their plans have clearly gone awry. Leaving Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas at home means Bernal will have almost no margin for error. Richard Carapaz, brought onto the Tour team at the last minute, would normally be a phenomenal secondary leader, but he may be a month out of peak condition after setting his sights on the Giro d'Italia.

Outside of Jumbo and Ineos is a motley crew of potential agitators, but none have the resources that are perhaps the Tour's only reliable predictor of success.

More importantly, who will win green and polka dots?

Both of these competitions could be great.

The green jersey is a points competition. It is typically considered the sprinters' jersey because they're the ones who tend to rack up stage wins, which give riders the biggest point bonuses. HOWEVER, this year's course is aggressively sprinter-unfriendly, with a lot of hillier stages that tend to leave flat-landers far behind. As a result, many sprinters decided not to bother with the Grande Boucle this year.

What's left are a lot sprinter-like puncheurs and puncheur-like sprinters licking their chops.

At the top of the list is Peter Sagan, who has won the green jersey seven of the last eight years. If you want even more pure speed, keep an eye on Caleb Ewan, Sam Bennett and Giacomo Nizzolo. But I'm going with Wout Van Aert, the 25-year-old Belgian who has looked like the best rider in the world since the August restart. The only thing holding him back may be his duties for Jumbo-Visma. But if he gets any leeway to hunt stages, he may mark the official end of Sagan's incredible reign.

As for the polka dot jersey given to the Tour's best climber, I'm partial to Romain Bardet, who confirmed Thursday that he'll be chasing polka dots, not the yellow jersey.

I love this decision. Bardet took the jersey last year and, more importantly, seemed to enjoy himself, removed from the microscope scrutiny of being a GC-plausible Frenchman. Riding for the overall isn't racing in the instinctual sense of See Finish, Cross Finish First. General classification-types can't just go fast; they have to finely ration their energy while paying paranoiac attention to their rivals' every pedal stroke. It looks mentally exhausting and not very much fun. I hope Bardet goes for the yellow jersey again someday, but I completely understand his desire to take on mountains with abandon instead, focusing only on his own legs.

Other candidates include calamity-prone Adam Yates, and pretty much everyone in the second tier of yellow jersey contenders (let's say, Fabio Aru). And of course, we have to make special mention of Julian Alaphilippe, who may be the only rider who could conceivably win either (or both?!) of the green and polka dot jerseys. Loulou is cycling's most delightful enigma.

What will we be hollering about the most?

Sepp Kuss! USA USA USA

The United States hasn't done much in the Tour since the infamous Armstrong era. Just three Americans will start the 2020 Tour — Tejay van Garderen and Neilson Powless with Education First, and Kuss with Jumbo-Visma — far below the 11 riders who started in 2011. Since then, Americans have finished top 10 in grand tours just seven times.

Kuss might not add to that tally this year, but he could solidify himself as the American grand tour hopeful of the future. He's entering the Tour on a brilliant run of form. His 10th-place finish at the Critérium du Dauphiné belies the effort he gave driving the Jumbo-Visma train in the mountains for team leaders Primoz Roglic and Tom Dumoulin. Few riders have been climbing better in the mountains this year, which Kuss proved by soloing to a stage victory on the Dauphiné's last day.

He's not Lance (and who would want him to be?) but he will be one of the most important animators of this year's race. And at 25 years old, he has time to develop his bona fides as a potential grand tour leader, if that's where his ambitions lay.

Who will break our hearts?

Thibaut Pinot :(

Pinot's relationship with the Tour de France can charitably be described as "tortured." Of his seven Tour starts, he has only finished three of them. His high water mark, a third-place finish, was six years ago. Last year, he lost nearly two minutes to his rivals when crosswinds blew up the peloton on a flat stage, only to claw his way back and put himself within a shout of winning yellow after an invigorating stage win on the Col du Tourmalet, only for that effort to be squandered by a muscle tear.

Pinot isn't the only rider to ever have bad luck in the Grande Boucle, but no one else invites psychoanalysis in the same way. No one else seems to work themselves into the same lather about the race, a fact of 1) being a Frenchman trying to win for the host nation for the first time in 35 years, and 2) being a fella who is naturally wound tight. Pinot has often spoken about the mental toll that the race has taken on him, and yet he constantly re-avows his goal to win, like a supervillain swearing I'll get you next time, Batman.

But Batman's tought to beat, isn't he? Pinot's problem is that he has set victory as the only acceptable outcome, which is hard to accomplish even on the off chance one makes the finish line in Paris. That means every year inevitably ends in the same way: Pinot broken and in tears, vowing to come back stronger after running off to his farm for solitude. He's a victim of his own emotional recklessness as much as ye gods.

Most combative — a.k.a., sassiest Frenchman?

The polar opposite of Thibaut Pinot is the Frenchman you'll see in every breakaway this year chugging with all his heart to give his obscure sponsor some quality airtime. These riders are almost always caught within the last 10 kilometers or so, but no matter. They'll be back the next day, flying in the face of fate.

This year's atrociously named sponsored team is B&B Hotels - Vital Concept P/B KTM, and this year's sacrificial hero is Pierre Rolland, who is edging out of his prime at 33 years old, but whose bona fides include three top 10 grand tour finishes and two Tour stage wins. Another prime candidate is Lilian Calmejane, a spritely climber for Total Direct Énergie who won a stage in 2017.

And finally … will this Tour even finish?

¯_(ツ)_/¯

Let's run through what we know of the matter.

1. Cycling has had a rather successful return. There have been scattered Covid-19 cases, sure, but for a sport that involves so much travel, outbreaks have been relatively contained.
2. It's hard to say how instructive that is, however. The Tour de France is three weeks long, which means riders will be spending a lot more time in close quarters with one another than they have been during the three- and five-day stage races. They also have to deal with an exponentially bigger circus. Will the media keep a safe distance? Will fans remember to wear masks?
3. The Tour implemented a strict protocol, which said that any team that tests positive for two Covid-19 cases among any of its members, not just riders, will be removed from the race. Strict is ostensibly good.
4. It's easy to see its weaknesses, though. If, say, two mechanics show symptoms, can a team really be trusted to get them tested, or will they quietly be sent home, instead? The Tour de France has historically had a slight problem with cover-ups.
5. And is the Tour really ready to boot the team with the yellow jersey in the third week if a couple staffers get sick? To that end, teams successfully lobbied UCI, cycling's governing body, to tone down the protocol so that the Tour will simply have the option to expel a team if two of its members test positive.
6. But that just means a self-interested organization now has even more control over the health and safety of hundreds of people. The Tour de France would very much like to see the Tour de France get to the end.
7. None of this inspires any warm feelings. My biggest source of confidence that the Tour will finish is that everyone involved with the Tour is deeply incentivized to stay safe. There's little job security in pro cycling, even compared to most pro sports. Teams have few direct money streams outside of sponsors.
8. So yes, I think we will see riders on the Champs-Élysées this year. We'll lose teams along the way, and the decision making processes will make our skin crawl. But this sport wouldn't have survived so long if it wasn't both bull-headed and anal retentive. Cycling will put on a show, even if it has to fight the world.

Stage 1 preview — 156km from Nice Moyen Pays to Nice

So on with the show.

Stage 1 will be three loops in and around Nice, likely to end in a bunch sprint on the gorgeous Promenade des Anglais. I put this stage high on my watchability list, if only for the fact that it's incredible the Tour is happening at all. Normally, the ceremony at the start of the Tour de France feels perfunctory. I imagine this one will be special even for riders who have made a dozen starts.

Nice will be very pretty to look at, too, with its fountains and white buildings and sea so blue I couldn't distinguish where water ended and sky began when I visited last year. (If you need a restaurant recommendation, go to L'Autre Part, which my girlfriend discovered). It'll be nice to bask in the Mediterannean sun, even through a TV set.

The racing will hopefully be a low-stakes, high-fun sprint that the speedsters take over once two Category 3 climbs are out of the way. I'll take Caleb Ewan to win over Giacomo Nizzolo, Sam Bennett, Bryan Coquard, Elia Viviani, Peter Sagan and scores of other sprinter-lite substances competing on the flats this year with so many of the traditionalists staying home.

Most of all, I'm excited for a pleasant time. Stage 1 may be the only day when we can pretend that hosting the Tour de France during a pandemic isn't supremely stupid. Enjoy the sunshine while it lasts.