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Tour de France 23 Thread

Man, where are they? Basque region? Saw a couple flags. Looks gorgeous.
 
imho, WVA was the best rider last year. Interested to watch him this year.
 
yes this is a wout van aert fan account
 
Wout Van Aert will chase stage wins in this year's Tour but he has promised to also support his teammate Vingegaard's quest for a second overall win and not chase the green jersey...but we will see what he does when he is faced with a choice between his own ambitions and those of his team.

Jason Gay wrote about him in the Wall Street Journal this week:

www.wsj.com

Meet the ‘Bo Jackson’ of the Tour de France

Belgium’s Wout van Aert won’t win the overall race—but the powerful 28-year-old can do almost anything else on a bicycle.
www.wsj.com www.wsj.com
...When the Tour de France begins on July 1, van Aert will be the most complete and compelling rider in the field, his celebrity burnished by a recent star turn in a Netflix documentary series. He will be a favorite to win multiple stages, as he did last Tour, winning three.


To be clear: van Aert has already won more Tour de France stages than [Tom] Boonen (nine to Boonen’s six) but he may never get close to some of Boonen’s other marks, like his four victories at the cobblestoned Paris-Roubaix and three more at the Tour of Flanders.

Also: The big-bodied (6-foot-3, 170 pounds) van Aert won’t contend for the overall title at this year’s Tour. The yellow jersey favors smaller riders, and the 2023 race will likely be another battle between 146-pound Tadej Pogacar of Slovenia and the defending champ, van Aert’s 132-pound Jumbo-Visma teammate, Jonas Vingegaard.
Instead van Aert is on a different path, joining the Dutch star Mathieu van der Poel and Great Britain’s Tom Pidcock as multi-discipline cyclists capable of competing 12 months a year. Van Aert remains a dominant cyclocross rider, but he’s proven himself capable of winning a Tour de France stage on the barren summit of Mont Ventoux, then a wild sprint on the Champs-Elysées, a feat van Aert pulled off in 2021.

There’s no one quite like him in the modern peloton–not even van der Poel or Pidcock. NBC Sports cycling analyst Christian Vande Velde went far afield to find an athlete with van Aert’s aura.
“It’s funny to say, but I’d compare him to Bo Jackson,” Vande Velde said, referring to the fabled baseball-football hyphenate. “He’s just a guy who breaks all the rules.”

In conversation, the 28-year-old van Aert is low-key about his status. Not everything has come easy—van Aert clawed back from a devastating crash at the Tour in 2019, and he’s had more than his fair share of second-place heartbreaks (including three to start last year’s Tour). He said it remains difficult to go elbow-to-elbow against the world’s best sprinters, or in time trials against specialists like Italy’s Filippo Ganna...

Not long ago, a cyclist with van Aert’s ability would have been pushed to choose: Are you a cyclocross racer or a road racer? Are you a sprinter or a climber? Van Aert refused. He attacked the road like a cyclocross racer, unleashing long, lung-busting efforts and handling skills honed by years on frozen, muddy courses.

“All the old stars of cycling were thinking it’s not possible, that you have to make a choice,” he recalled. He, van der Poel and Pidcock (the latter two also compete in elite-level mountain biking) have shown it’s possible to race many styles, “and it maybe gives you something extra.” (Pogacar, a two-time Tour winner, has also shown staggering range, triumphing at Flanders this year.)

During the Tour, van Aert will have another role: being a key support teammate for Vingegaard’s yellow jersey defense. This means everything from chasing down opponent attacks to fetching food and water for Jumbo-Visma riders to pedaling in front of Vingegaard to protect him from the wind. (In cycling, riding in another person’s slipstream allows a rider to save significant energy.)

It’s grunt work, but van Aert’s done it before.

The Netflix series “Tour de France: Unchained” flagged tension between the goals of van Aert and Vingegaard during the 2022 race, a documentary van Aert recently dismissed as “focused on commotion.”

Whatever the case, it’s hard to argue with Jumbo-Visma’s results–Vingegaard won his first ever yellow with van Aert’s assistance, and Vingegaard, in return, laid off the pedals in a late time trial stage to give van Aert another stage victory.


...During races, the lanky van Aert looms large, literally. “He is a specimen,” said Vande Velde. The U.S. racer Neilson Powless of Team EF Education-Easypost said whenever van Aert is pedaling the lead group, “you know there’s still a big engine there, so you can’t do anything stupid.”

“Wout can get over most big mountains, and not many people are faster than him on a flat road,” said Powless, a potential Tour stage winner himself. “He can sort of do it all.”

Last year, van Aert blew away the Tour field to win the overall green jersey as the race’s best sprinter. This year, he doesn’t plan to exhaust himself chasing green–he’ll save something for the world championships in August, where he will be a threat in both the road race and the individual time trial.

Other ambitions remain. In 2020, van Aert captured Italy’s Milan-San Remo race to take his first one-day “monument,” but he’s yet to win either the Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix. This spring at Roubaix, he was dueling with van der Poel at the front only to suffer a flat tire and drop to third.

...He remains committed to cyclocross. This year, van Aert finished second to van der Poel in a thrilling worlds finale that came down to a one-on-one sprint.

Within cycling, “MVDP” and “WVA” are spoken of like Federer and Nadal, generational opponents redefining their sport. Though they’ve known each other since childhood, van Aert acknowledged it’s more of a rivalry than a friendship.

“I think it’s a normal relationship between two sportsmen,” he said. “We both have respect for each other. He’s an inspiration for me to go out training and to try to be better, because he’s beaten me a lot of times.”

What both van Aert and van der Poel both know well is fame. In the U.S., a pro cyclist can walk around unrecognized, but van Aert is a celebrity in Belgium, where champions like Boonen and five-time Tour winner Eddy Merckx (widely considered the G.O.A.T. of men’s cycling, even more Wout than Wout) are idols.

“If you’ve been to Belgium recently, it’s cuckoo,” said the former U.S. pro Jeremy Powers. He called van Aert’s fame in Belgium “Taylor Swift level…People come to his house for autographs, and he can’t do a lot...”
Click to expand...
 
Reminder because someone hipped me to this on this board last year deeper in the Tour (thank you), but if you have Peacock you have the option to tune into the World Feed. Fewer/no commercials, different commentators, speeds and distances announced in metric.
 
There is def a sense of comfort and the familiar with Phil and Bob. Can do without the studio and commercials, though.
 
25 years ago next week or so I was on a super long train journey from Brighton to Sevilla, via London, Paris, Madrid.

Overnight train hit San Sebastián at sunrise, it was glorious looking, so stoked for the arrival today.

Also, any time I see Tete de la course, I am required to post:

 
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