Binioù braz bagpipes were blowing, banniel Breiz flags were flying in their thousands, and Brittany in its entirety called out ‘Breizh degemer mat Le Tour’ to welcome the Tour de France Femmes to the north-eastern corner of the country for the Grand Départ at the weekend.
The race exited Brittany for good on Monday’s third stage as the peloton raced eastwards to the flatlands of central France. However, the loud, frantic, and thoroughly absorbing two-and-a-half days in Breizh have left their mark on riders, fans, and towns alike.
Brittany has a long and storied history with the men’s Tour de France, with eight editions of the race having started there dating back to 1952. Local heroes Bernard Hinault, Louison Bobet, Lucien Petit-Breton, and Jean Robic account for 11 of France’s 36 Tour triumphs, meanwhile
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To date, no Breton riders have won the women’s Tour or its predecessors. In fact, before this year, no editions of the modern race had even visited the Celtic nation.
It had been something of an oversight, given Brittany’s outsize influence, relative to its population, on cycling through the years. Alongside the list of Breton Tour winners stands perhaps cycling’s greatest-ever manager, Cyrille Guimard.
Current UCI President David Lappartient is another Breton, while this year, eight Bretons started the men’s Tour with Jordan Jegat racing to 10th overall as Valentin Madouas, Bryan Coquard, and home team, Arkéa-B&B Hotels, also took part.
The Tour de France Femmes peloton races past the ancient city walls of Vannes during the opening stage of the race (Image credit: Szymon Gruchalski/Getty Images)
And then there are the races themselves, from the dirt ribin roads of Tro-Bro Léon, which raises money for Breton-language schools, to the GP du Morbihan, Bretagne Women’s Tour, the top-level Classic Lorient Agglomération and Bretagne Classic-Ouest France, and hundreds more down the amateur and youth ranks.
Cycling culture runs deep in a region which boasts more racing licenses, proportionally, than any other in France. EF Education-Oatly’s GC hopeful Cédrine Kerbaol told Cyclingnews that racing is thriving at all levels.
“I think Brittany is really a place where there are a lot of cyclists and where a lot of young people start cycling,” she said a day after the race hit Brest, 30 minutes from her hometown of Plouarzel.
“It’s in the history of Brittany. We have a lot of big riders coming from here, and there are lots of races. I was looking at the calendar here the other day. It’s crazy! Every few days, there is something like three races for young people, so it’s really good.”
Kerbaol lined up by the port in the picture postcard town of Vannes on Saturday as one of nine Breton women at the Grand Départ, including FDJ-Suez’s French champion Marie Le Net and Movistar veteran Aude Biannic.
Marie-Morgane Le Deunff was also on the list. The 23-year-old Winspace rider only got the call-up at 5pm on Friday, hastily cancelling a bikepacking holiday to make the start.
Even with the short notice, she enjoyed spirited support, though a week off the bike caught up with her on stage 2, leaving her to ride 70km alone before missing the time cut.
It was a happier day for Brest native Maëva Squiban (UAE Team ADQ), meanwhile, who took the combativity prize after attacking on the hills to Quimper. Explaining the depth of feeling and national pride she and her fellow Breton racers feel, she said the day was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“It’s so special. I think it’s only one time in your life that you can have this moment,” she told Cyclingnews after the finish. “This morning, I had all my family at the start. It has been crazy with all the people and all the Breton flags.
“I’m super happy to be here and to be in the front on the local lap was really special. I think it’s one of the best moments of my life on the bike.
“To be honest, I don’t have the words to describe these two days. It was really a good idea to have the Grand Départ of the Tour de France in Brittany.”
Breton fans wave the banniel Breiz flag ahead of stage 3 in La Gacilly (Image credit: Julien De Rosa/AFP/Getty Images)
Biannic, who hails from Landerneau, another town close to Brest, couldn’t resist attacking on home roads, either.
She told Ouest-France that the packed crowds that lined the parcours throughout the Grand Départ had taken her by surprise, even in the “heart of cycling”, as she described her region.
“It’s incredible. There are so many people here. We are never disappointed,” she told Cyclingnews at the stage 3 start in La Gacilly on Tuesday. “We don’t always have this many people cheering the whole time along the whole stage. I’m just happy to be here and I try to enjoy every moment I can.”
‘When I see all these people, it’s like it’s the spirit of Brittany’
It’s something of a truism to state that one’s home is important, but having spent a long weekend in Brittany, the sense of joy and pride – from the nine women racing the Tour to the countless fans by the roadside – rose beyond that of an average Tour visit (that hunch is even backed up by polling data ¹ ²).
The Breton flag was impossible to escape. Its numbers dwarfed the Vlaamse Leeuw and Ikurrina seen at the Tour of Flanders and Itzulia, and the Cyclingnews car will carry its newly acquired decoration – along with a chunk of kouign-amann pastry – on towards the Alps.
Nestled in among that sea of flags were the fan clubs, one for each home rider, and it wasn’t hard to miss the signs, t-shirts, and chants as scores of locals loudly and colourfully supported their racers.
Le Net’s fan club made the short trip from her hometown of Pontivy to the Côte de Cadoudal to claim an entire corner of the climb as the ‘Virage Marie Le Net’. She’d later describe her experience of racing up the hill as “magical.”
The French champion, a debutant at the race like Ryo and Trégouët, has worn a smile as readily as the tricolor this weekend. It was only amplified as she attempted to give a debriefing after stage 2, as her fan club stood at the FDJ-Suez bus chanting her name and banging a drum like a crowd of football ultras.
“I’m so proud to be from Brittany,” she told Cyclingnews, before explaining how her introduction to cycling is interlaced with that sense of national pride.
“It was just from small rides with my family and my father. He found that I was pretty good, so he decided to put me in a club and I loved the feeling of riding with them
“When I see all these people, it’s like it’s the spirit of Brittany. We’re all supporting each other, and I love that since I started with cycling. Now it continues here.”
French champion Marie Le Net enjoyed a dedicated, and very vocal, fan club during the Tour’s Grand Départ (Image credit: Szymon Gruchalski/Getty Images)
The lesser-known Titia Ryo, racing at Arkéa-B&B Hotels with another Breton, Maurène Trégouët, enjoyed a similar fan club experience as she came face-to-face with herself printed on dozens of t-shirts.
“When I went by for the first time, I smiled and waved at them so they could see me in the middle of the pack. I was so happy to see them. It really means a lot to me that so many people came out for me. It’s crazy!” she told Breton newspaper Le Télégramme.
“The emotions sometimes overflowed. As Maurène and I said to each other on the podium, we felt the tears welling up.”
Le Net, Ryo, and their fellow Bretons – who also include Célia Le Mouël (Ceratizit) and Elyne Roussel (St Michel-Preference Home-Auber93) – will have undoubtedly taken inspiration from the feverish support as they experience the Tour at home for the first time.
The group of nine may not have scored any of the big wins of the opening three days, though Kerbaol is well-placed in the thick of the GC fight a year on from her sixth-placed finish.
Racing on home ground, her compatriots have perhaps pushed beyond what they might otherwise have achieved, with time spent out in the breakaway, on the podium, and, in Le Deunff’s case, grittily fighting to stay in the race against the odds.
But the fan-rider relationship has been a symbiotic one. Just like the other 145 riders who set off in Vannes, they’ve inspired others. Young girls have waited to greet their new heroes in the start and finish towns, or kêrioù, and watch them race down the twisting roads.
Where there was once no such race to fill such a role in the past, the Tour de France Femmes now stands.
“It’s different because it’s the Tour de France. Everyone knows this race, even if you’re not a cyclist,” Biannic told Cyclingnews. “It’s amazing to start in Brittany because it’s maybe the most important sport here, and it’s a reference in France.”
For Kerbaol, the Tour serves as that all-important reference point for the next generation, one which she didn’t have growing up.
“We didn’t have the women’s Tour, so I didn’t have like a model person I could follow,” she told Cyclingnews. “But now it’s good to see that for the young generation, they have races to watch and riders to follow.
“They can dream…”
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