Cyclers performing a lap at the Tour de France.
Declan Langton ’22
Editor-in-Chief
For the second year in a row, Tadej Pogacar, the 22-year-old Slovenian from UAE Team Emirates, has won the Tour de France, the annual cycling grand tour that traverses France each summer in a pack known as a peloton. Starting this year on June 26 in Brest, a town in Bretagne in the northwest of France, and concluding on July 18 at the Champs-Elysees in Paris, this Tour began with crashes that shaped the field for the next three weeks of racing.
The Tour de France has taken place nearly every summer since 1903, when the race was just six stages occurring in July. This year, the Tour de France consists of 21 stages with two rest days: three weeks of intense racing covering around 3,414 kilometers, with individual stages of up to 249.1 km. The Tour stages can include sprint and mountain top finishes, climbs through the Alps and Pyrenees, flat and hilly rides across France and time trials, where riders compete against the clock to gain or lose seconds against each other.
The race is broken into five different prizes: the yellow jersey for the overall winner (the cyclist with the shortest time); the green jersey for the points classification (often won by the best sprinter); the polka-dot jersey (for the most climbing points); the white jersey (for the best young rider –– the fastest overall time achieved by a rider 26 years old); and the super-combativity prize (awarded in Paris to a rider who was aggressive throughout the Tour and animated many of the stages). During every stage, eachach jersey is worn by the current leader of its classification. A combativity prize is awarded to an individual at the end of each stage.
In 2021, Pogacar became the youngest rider ever to win the yellow jersey at two consecutive Tours. He was not just the overall winner, but also the leader of the white and polka dot jersey classifications.
Pogacar started his lead in the eighth stage of the Tour in the mountains. He won a total of three stages this year, the first being a time trial in Stage 5, followed by two back-to-back stages in the Pyrenees, Stages 17 and 18.
Wout van Aert, a Belgian rider from Team Jumbo-Visma, also dominated the field. He came close to the yellow jersey in the first week of the race and finished overall in 19th position. Van Aert also took three stages in the high mountains of Stage 11, in the time trial on Stage 20 and, finally, on the iconic sprint into Paris on Stage 21.
Stage 15 led to a victory for Colorado’s Sepp Kuss, a teammate of van Aert. “It was really a special day and it’s cool to know that you won a stage in the Tour de France,” Kuss said afterwards.
Michela Marchini ’22 is a fan of his back in the U.S. “One of my favorite riders, Sepp Kuss, won his first stage ever in the Tour this year, and I was so happy,” she said.
This was Marchini’s second year watching the Tour.
“It truly is a feat of human ability. I find myself in awe of the abilities of these riders constantly throughout the event,” she said.
Though the sport isn’t necessarily popular in the U.S. — Kuss was only one of four American riders — Marchini still found herself invested.
“I remember missing a stage one Friday and checking the rankings after the fact and seeing so many huge differences in the general classification from the day before,” she recalled. “Even though I now knew the results of the day, I was like, I have to watch this stage, because I need to know what happened, [how] all this got shaken up so bad.”
Marked by crashes, the first week of the Tour saw the injury and occasional abandonment of many major names in the sport. Some observers believe these crashes created an entirely different race than usual.
In an opinion piece published in Peloton Magazine, Australian sports journalist Sophie Smith wrote, “The peloton is battered, bruised and missing some of its biggest names after only the first week of the Tour de France, which has been marred by blame-game industry politics and well-documented crashes.” Australian sprinter and green-jersey favorite Caleb Ewan fell during a fast sprint at the end of Stage 3, also taking down Slovakian cyclist Peter Sagan, a seven-time winner of the green jersey. In Stage 1, a crash caused by a spectator holding up a sign in front of the peloton led to major injuries across the group of favorites, including last year’s second place finisher Primoz Roglic and former Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas of Wales.
At the start of Stage 4, riders neutralized the first few kilometers of racing by ceasing to ride for several minutes to protest the dangerous conditions of the Tour de France created by the crashes. Smith called this protest “meek at best.”
Sagan believed the riders should be doing more. “The riders, we have to change our mind, otherwise it’s going to get only worse. Nothing is going to change anyway. The last 10 years, it’s only worse and worse,” he said. Sagan abandoned the Tour before the start of Stage 12, citing the injury from his crash on Stage 3. “On Stage 3, the chainring hit my knee and entered the skin above the patella, leaving a deep wound,” he explained. After a few days, an infection developed in his knee, even though race doctors helped to clean it out.
Without Ewan and Sagan, the sprint competition was left to the likes of van Aert, Jasper Philipsen of Alpecin-Fenix and the man who would take the green jersey in 2021, Mark Cavendish of Deceuninck-QuickStep.
Cavendish is an old and well-known name in pro-cycling circles, having previously won 30 stages in the Tour and one green jersey. Before 2021, his most recent Tour de France stage win was in 2016. This year, he shocked himself when he won four more stages, equalling the Belgian legend Eddy Merckx’s record of 34 stage wins. Cycling News called this season his “comeback year.” However, in the final stage into Paris, Cavendish took third, which prevented him from surpassing Merckx’s record. He lost to van Aert, who took first, and Philipsen, who came in second. Both of them are Belgian.
Cavendish wasn’t originally supposed to be on Deceuninck-QuickStep’s 2021 Tour de France team. According to Cycling News, he had been looking to retire at the end of 2020, since he had no contract. “But a last-minute contract offer came his way from Patrick Lefevere with a one-year deal put on the table from Deceuninck-Quickstep,” Cycling News reported. Cavendish accepted this offer and competed in a few races with the team. Just a few days before the 2020 Tour, Deceuninck-Quickstep’s sprinter and defending 2020 green jersey winner Sam Bennett was injured, and Cavendish was placed on the team.
Though he was unable to break the record, Cavendish said in a team press release, “I’m very happy. One month ago, I wasn’t supposed to do the Tour de France, and now I am here, after three weeks that will live long in memory.”
Outside of the breaking records, the Tour de France had other goals for 2021: diversity and environmentalism.
In April 2021, Frenchman Kevin Reza, the only Black rider in the 2020 Tour de France race and one of five Black riders in the 2021 professional peloton, spoke to Sky Sports News about a hope for progress and greater inclusion in cycling in the coming years.
“I’ve known racism since I was young,” he said. “I am destined to know it by my birth and my origins; it is like that. Unfortunately, it is painful and degrading. But we are used to living like that, and it should not be a habit.”
“They manage to ban cheaters who take drugs, which is normal,” he said. “I think that racism and discrimination in general must be on a par with these kinds of acts. I do not see any other action that can be taken against racist acts.” Reza concluded, “As a minimum, you would expect to see a racist get punished like a doper. I think this is one of the best solutions. It would show they’re taking a strong stance in terms of supporting action against the various forms of discrimination within sport.”
The Tour also tried this year to be more environmentally friendly, according to The Guardian. They wrote, “a race that used to leave a sea of plastic waste and litter in its wake, and clog up the high pasture of the Alps and Pyrenees with diesel fumes, is working hard to green up its act.” This year, for the first time, race organizers all used hybrid vehicles. Team cars, though, did not have to take up this adjustment. The Tour has released other changes to its plans on their website on a page called “Riding into the future.”
Another change is coming, too, for the Tour in 2022: the start of the women’s race. “It is long overdue,” Jeremy Whittle wrote for the Guardian. The race will have multiple stages and will last about a week.
“This is a huge moment for professional women’s cycling,” Anna van der Breggen, the current women’s UCI world champion, said. “It’s long been a dream for many of us to compete in a women’s Tour de France.”