Baptiste Veistroffer seemed incredulous at various points during his solo breakaway on stage 5 of the Tour de France. “Three minutes only, with one guy alone?” he asked of his directors in the team car, almost finding comedy in the proximity at which he, as one versus 181, was being patrolled by the powers of the peloton.
When it was all said and done, he asked himself why none of those 181 had been minded to join him.
“I don’t understand why I was all alone in going. There are riders who you’re never going to see all day, when we have an amazing chance to race the Tour de France.”
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Such is the way in modern cycling. The southern French furnace surely dampened the enthusiasm for 150km of toil, but even so, the breakaway on a flat-track nailed-on sprint stage such as this is a dying art.
There are many reasons for that. The age of publicity-hungry teams going up the road for the sole purpose of sponsor air-time is evaporating. The depth of professional cycling has increased with the rising budgets, and now pretty much every team in the race sees themselves as here to compete rather than make up the numbers.
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You used to be able to rely on the wildcard teams invited by ASO, for whom it would be a de facto pact with ASO to animate the race and justify their inclusion. But there are only two wildcards now, and even they want a sprint – Caja Rural are here with Fernando Gaviria.
All the while, the sprinters’ teams have long since worked out that keeping even the most unthreatening breakaways on a short leash is more physiologically efficient than riding very easily at the start then very hard at the end. And so the days of double-digit time gaps, and the touch of jeopardy they added, are long gone.
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In some cases, that has even meant stages where we’ve seen no breakaway whatsoever, with the peloton just rolling along for 150km before the sprint finish. In a way, then, Veistroffer saved stage 5, at least maintaining the framework of a race.
“Pogačar gave me a little pat on the back and other riders said ‘well played’,” the Frenchman revealed in a post-stage interview with French newspaper L’Equipe.
“If I hadn’t done it, the day could have been very very long for the fans. Well, I suppose it could still have felt long.”
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It no doubt felt long for Veistroffer, too, with no one to share the headwind, but the feeling of animating one of the biggest sporting events in the world was not lost upon him.
“I enjoyed my day, with the people on the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, under a tree with a little barbecue to the side. They waited for hours for the caravan and the riders. I look left, look right, I see the flags, I hear the encouragements.
“It’s incredible to be French at the Tour de France.”
The whole operation was, of course, doomed to failure, but did he believe in it at any point?
“No, but there is still a little something in the back of your head telling you ‘and what if all the planets aligned?’ But you’d have to be crazy.”
Perhaps, as he hinted, it would have been crazier still not to give it a shot at all.
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