A Good Tour de France Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

ORCIÈRES-MERLETTE, France — When Richard Carapaz spread his arms in celebration after pounding up the final climb of Stage 18, I felt a sense of relief. The champagne flowed, the tears streamed. The hundreds of days that dozens of support staff worked in the cloistered, unforgiving world of professional cycling had paid off. EF Education-EasyPost had finally validated its strong Tour de France with a stage win.

The Tour de France awards a wide bounty of prizes beyond the yellow jersey to its 23 teams. You can target one of the other three jerseys, which take comprehensive three-week efforts and team support. You can go after one of the 21 stages, more a matter of tactics than strategy, and also subject to the whims of the biggest teams. Or you can scrap for the smaller stuff like winning some intermediate sprints, wearing one of the jerseys for a day or two, or simply being visible. Variety is one part of what makes the Tour’s competitive landscape so well-tended; the other is scarcity. While every team will enter the race with different goals, there’s not enough to go around. The fun part is seeing which prizes each team pursues, who that puts them in conflict or alliance with, and how their plans are forced to evolve over the three weeks of racing. What does a successful Tour look like? Every team has a different answer.

EF is the perfect team through which to understand how complicated and intriguing this all is. Unlike UAE or Visma, EF wasn’t going to target the yellow jersey. But they’re also stronger than the bottom feeders, and as such have larger ambitions than merely notable participation. For example, Lotto have had a good Tour despite having only won some combativity awards, simply because they keep putting riders in doomed breakaways and having them hold on longer than chasing teams expect. Last year, EF had a dream Tour, with Ben Healy taking a stage win, finishing tenth overall, spending some time in the yellow jersey, and winning the overall combativity prize. This time around, Healy didn’t come into the Tour fully healthy, and though EF had superstar rider Richard Carapaz back, he was also recovering from surgery and couldn’t realistically target another Tour podium. So it was time to win some stages.

The goal? “Be in every breakaway that made it to the finish,” EF founder and CEO Jonathan Vaughters told Defector. In that answer, you can see how EF are thinking about how to handle the biggest teams in the race. They know there’s no beating Tadej Pogacar straight up. They also know Pogacar’s team can’t chase everything down, so the goal is to identify which stages his team might not invest in and then figure out how to win them. “Today was a day we knew we could win,” Vaghters said. “We treated it like the six or seven other days we knew we could win.”

Before Carapaz blew everyone away on Orcières-Merlette, EF had been involved at the sharp end of almost every stage. Alex Baudin made it to the line with three other guys on Stage 9. He finished fourth in the sprint, and after the race, EF director Charly Wegelius told me they’d tried to find a place in the final 20 kilometers for Baudin to jump for a solo flier. But they’d run out of uphill ramps, and he found himself with the best one-day rider of his generation, so he finished fourth. Carapaz lit up the next stage with a well-timed attack, briefly putting a minute-plus into Pogacar and the general classification contenders before Pogacar decided he wanted to win and made Carapaz look like he was pedaling squares. With each passing day, the number of winnable stages dwindled.

At the same time, the desperation of the underperforming teams was growing. Netcompany-Ineos may as well not be here. Bahrain has a mostly anonymous Lenny Martinez top-ten and absolutely nothing else. Roughly half of the teams in the race have done basically nothing. Picnic-PostNL has started baking cake for the press so there will be some people around their bus at the start. With only back-to-back Alpe d’Huez days and the new Paris finale on tap, Stage 18 was the last, best breakaway opportunity in the race. UAE has been experiencing mass illness, so Pogacar wasn’t going to ask anyone to chase, and with the Alpe looming, neither Decathlon nor Red Bull were going to push their luck.

Everyone wanted to be at the front. Consider the other five riders who made the final selection with Carapaz. Mauro Schmid of Jayco had already won a stage, guaranteeing his increasingly vibeless Jayco team a good Tour. Matteo Jorgenson battled illness and injury for two weeks, only to lose his team leader Jonas Vingegaard to a crash; Visma pivoted quickly to pursuing stage wins, though its Tour hasn’t and probably can’t be a good one. Valentin Paret-Pentre’s QuickStep team has won three stages, while he’s making a late break for the polka dot jersey, so they’re having a great Tour. Tobias Halland Johannessen will be disappointed not to follow up his sixth place from last year, but Uno-X is having an amazing Tour. Raul Garcia Pierna’s Movistar team has been almost completely anonymous, and Stage 18 was its final chance. The narrative stakes of each rider winning were wildly different, but only one could win.

Carapaz ultimately left no doubt. He picked the right time to jump into the big move of the day, made what would turn out to be the decisive split, and was clearly the strongest on the final climb. Wegelius urged Carapaz on in Spanish—one of the eight languages he speaks—telling him, “They’re dead, keep going.” An EF staffer told me that Carapaz’s wheel slipped twice the first time he attacked, forcing him to pull up early. But he saw in the way his breakmates responded that he was going to cook them. Asked after the stage if his legs were sore, he laughed and said they didn’t hurt at all.

So, did this redeem EF’s Tour? “Ultimately, whether you have a good Tour or a bad Tour, there is an amount of luck that’s involved,” Vaughters said. “And we have been strong, we’ve executed, and we’ve had an excellent Tour de France before today. Today, all the pieces just came together better.”

There’s something impressive in knowing that success depends on either outsmarting or outflanking the best teams in the race. Though UAE are masters of control, the Tour de France is ultimately too wild a beast to fully tame. They can’t chase down every move for three weeks. It requires too much effort, for one, but also a race that long is ultimately subject to acts of entropy. Guys get sick, race situations evolve, attackers overwhelm. EF got what they came for and secured a great Tour de France, because they knew what to try for and were comfortable with the attendant uncertainty.