Tour de France 2021
 

I see someone has resurrected my thread for the Tour from last year. I think it will be easier to have one devoted to this year, so I will start one.
Once again we are looking forward to following the Tour. We had a taster when we recently watched the final 50 - 70 kms of each day of the Criterium de Dauphine which we enjoyed. It was great to see Richie Porte win after coming second twice. The Criterium is often seen as a ' form guide ' for the Tour and also as a chance for some riders to impress team management and get selected for the Tour.

So here's to three weeks of beautiful French countryside, lovely chateaux, abbeys, churches, little villages, ruins on tops of hills and, of course, why we are all here, some exciting and entertaining cycling.

We like the Tour as well and watch on SBS (Australia). When does it start?

Lavandula

It starts on Saturday 26th. We are Australian as well and we watch it on the Skoda Tour tracker which is connected to SBS I think. You may already be using this, but if not, it is good because it has the whole stage live and no ads. We connect the computer to the TV and settle in . We watched the Dauphine highlights on SBS on Demand. It is the closest we Australians will get to France for a long while.

Kerouac put the map up with the tour route on the other thread. Starts in Brest on June 26th.

This is the official tour site.

https://www.letour.fr/en/overall-route

If the self isolation rules for ré-entry into the U.K. change , I may get to to Saint Emilion time trail. I can’t justify another 5 days self isolation for a 2 day trip. This year is beginning to look like solitary confinement.

Good news BritishCaicos;
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/h...s-b941064.html
Hoping they will go ahead with this soon.

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fod...7f1e906ea7.jpg

I know tulips , it’s going in the right direction but I’ve heard it all before, I haven’t checked the route for those two days but it must be very close to us just South of Castillon la Bataille fingers crossed.

We, too, cannot wait. Watched every hour of the Giro d'Italia. NBC Sports carries it here in the U.S., and they better air the entire stages and not just the last 30k. Their coverage is absolute trash. RIP Paul Sherwen. (Yes, he and Phil commentated on NBC, too. But they were a great team. We met them at the Pro Challenge in Colorado. Such fun gents.)

I have been getting more and more bored by the TdF since the end of the "enhanced competitor" era. Without steroids and blood doping, there are enough riders at the top of human and mechanical ability that there is no differentiation among the top competitors.

Every flat stage can be summarized as "There's a breakaway. The racers get to 10 km from the end and catch the breakaway. There is a sprint in the last 30 seconds." Variations depend on crashes and mechanical failures. The mountain stages consist of splits in the peloton with a 20% chance that the front breakaway finishes first. The time trials have always been boring.

So I watch for the scenic shots. And the crashes.

it may be an idea to attempt to achieve around 20% what the riders achieve on an average day in the race. It’s then easier to appreciate the test that is the TdF. An average speed on a flat stage is usually around 30mph over 5 hours. Take some time to think about that.

Thanks for the tips about the Skoda Tracker Rhon. We will experiment!

and thanks for the map Kerouac!

Lavandula

Go to Cycling Central on the SBS site and the details are there. We plug into the TV for a bigger screen but you can just watch on the computer. If you have Apple Play you can connect that way as well, I think. But we do not have it.

Hi All and hope everyone is well and happy. Our favourite time of the year once again. We too watched the Giro d Italia and the Criterion. We have also watched The Least Expected Day ( 2 series) an inside look at the Movistar Team on Netflix. It was absolutely fascinating and I wish I knew someone else who had seen it so I could discuss it.
It was very brave of Chris Froome to even get on a bike, let alone participate in the Criterion. I was happy for Richie Porte too even though Ineos isn’t my favourite team.
I have also the TdF magazine and will settle down over this cold weekend to read it all. Thanks rhon for starting this thread again. Now to decide who I will support this year……

It is about this time of year that I start to really scrutinize the route and the dates to see if there is any way for me to be in the right place at the right time. In former years, that was generally somewhere within reach of Avignon, where I would spend a week for the Off festival. But I have not attended the Off for three years now even though I expect to return next year if there are no masks and other health annoyances. One time, the suburban hotel where I often stayed was chosen by the Tour for some of their minor advertising employees and it was fun to even share the breakfast room with the girls (yes, a sexist job) who would be throwing little gifts to the bystanders along the route that day.

I have been at the starting stage a few times, which is interesting if you go early because you see every stage of preparation and then finally the start. But my two favorite Tour events happened mostly by accident. One time I was driving along some roads in the south of France, and there were a lot of signs telling when the road would be closed to traffic for the Tour. People were beginning to choose their parking spots by the roadside, so I pulled off, too, and decided to wait for the Tour, even though it would be a couple of hours before they arrived. It was a hot day, but I actually had a little cooler plugged into the power point (cigarette lighter of olden days), and it was filled with icy drinks, in addition to the food items I had on hand. So I was a happy camper.

Just sitting by the side of the road watching the other people, their children (turbulent or not), people looking for places to pee discreetly -- it was all just as fascinating as watching the Tour itself arrive. And of course then there were the helicopters to give you advance notice, the publicity caravan with the people throwing junk to the crowd in frenzy (I think I got a few things.), and finally the riders, the leaders, the peleton, and the people struggling at the end. It is really so much more emotional than anything you can see on television.

Another time, I went with two friends to the Vimy Canadian memorial when the Tour was going past all of the major places of WW1 in that part of France. I chose Vimy because I knew the area and had decided that it would have the best viewing areas. The weather was pretty awful that day but we still got excellent views of the riders and had a great picnic in the car (because of the weather). But the best part was driving back to Paris. I took small roads not too far from the route of the Tour and kind of sniffed out where I thought they would pass (since a car goes considerably faster than a bicycle) and on impulse turned into a village where there were cars parked everywhere. I found a place to park and we all rushed down to the main crossroad. We saw the Tour pass 5 minutes later, and it was spectacular. (Also the weather had improved quite a bit.)

So there are a number of ways to appreciate the Tour, which is an incredible sociological event even for people with no interest in sports.

Thanks, rhon, for starting the thread and kerouac for the map and the anecdotes. The closest I ever got to the Tour was when we lived in Kent and it was starting there but something, I forget what, stopped us going. oh well, I'm certainly not going to be watching it live this year.

IMO the best coverage in the UK is on ITV, even though Chris Boardman has retired. One of the best parts of the programme was his preview when he rode part of the route and talked about its difficulties and the tactics that the cyclists might adopt. They offer live coverage of every day plus evening highlights which we tend to record so we can fast forward through the adverts.

Why doesn't Lefevere shut up? I am sad Sam Bennett is not riding but to say it is fear of failure and not a knee injury is not cool.

Yeah, looks like sour grapes, as Bennett is said to be leaving the team. I love cycling but not it's politics and some of the inane rules. (Some rules are important for safety, don't get me wrong.)

Good news for Cav fans though - due to Bennett dropping out, Cav will be riding for Quickstep again this year. Hooray!