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It’s the evening before the start of the Tour de France, and I’ve just made it back to my hotel having spent the day venturing between team press events and a string of interviews.
Twitter 🟢 — Instagram 🔴 — Bluesky 🔵
Andy Schleck and Derek Gee-West audio interviews are in the Founding Members’ WhatsApp group, while our final instalment of the Tour de France Power Rankings was published this morning. One sports director pointed out that my selection of Harold Tejada as an outside pick for the top-15 was, and I quote, ‘an ok shout’. High praise indeed.
My highlight of the day came at Lidl-Trek. No sooner had I hit publish on my Andy Schleck story than I heard my name mentioned across the hotel lobby. When I looked over, a clutch of senior management from the team were discussing the story – I could see the green logo on one of their phone screens as I walked over to introduce myself. It felt like a nice moment of recognition.
Overall, it was a really slick press conference, with the media team doing a really good job of ensuring all the journalists had the interviews they wanted, and with Lidl on board, the snacks were elite.
In the afternoon it was over to EF Education-EasyPost for another well-organised and relaxed press conference involving Ben Healy, Richard Carapaz and Jonathan Vaughters. The audio from that event is also in the WhatsApp group. There was also exciting new tech on show ahead of the TTT, too. More on that tomorrow…
Lowlight of the day: the heat. Just walking around is hard going.
Daniel 🫶
Earlier, L’Equipe reported that Ben O’Connor had agreed terms on a deal that would reunite him with Decathlon. It’s not clear how long the contract is for, but we first reported the links between the Australian and his former team in June.
By that point it had become apparent that Felix Gall was off to Lidl-Trek and that Decathlon were on the lookout for a replacement. There weren’t many GC riders still on the market, but O’Connor made a lot of sense. He knows the team, and to be honest, it’s not quite worked out for him – yet – at Jayco AlUla. There’s also the fact that Decathlon would have been more willing to pay the Australian a Grand Tour-level salary, which is what he’s roughly on now.
Right at the start of the day, I called O’Connor to talk about the Tour, and I’ll run the majority of that chat tomorrow, but here’s what he said when I asked about his future in terms of his contract position given that he was the best GC rider on the market.