'It never goes to plan anyway' - Novel Tour team time trial promises opening day intrigue

The occasional furore over light conditions notwithstanding, the team time trial has tended to offer a rather anticlimactic start to Grand Tours. There is good reason why the Tour de France had not chosen to start with a team time trial since 1971 and why the discipline had been absent from the route altogether since 2019.

The twist on the traditional team time trial rolled out at Paris-Nice three years ago has triggered a shift in ASO’s mindset, however, and the revised rules make their debut at the Tour on Saturday’s opening stage in Barcelona.

Damaging crashes aside, recent early team time trials at the Vuelta a España and Giro d’Italia have told us precious little about the remainder of the race. The opening salvo of this Tour, by contrast, promises an afternoon of high intrigue in the Catalan capital.

Although teams are engaged in a collective effort on Saturday, the times are taken individually at the finish. That detail, together with the stiff climb to the line on Montjuïc, means that this 19km test could offer some genuine pointers about the direction of travel at this Tour.

Above all, it might shed some light on the internal hierarchies at teams that set out with dual leaders, including Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe and Lidl-Trek. This is a team time trial expressly designed to make an impact.

“I love this format because it really captures the essence of cycling: an individual sport that is practised as a team,” Tour director Christian Prudhomme told AFP. “We would never have introduced a team time trial if it hadn’t been for that rule.”

The restoration of the team time trial to the Tour has seen squads devote considerable resources to the discipline over the course of the season. The Challenge Mallorca organisers had the foresight to make the Trofeo Ses Salines a team time trial this year, and that was enough to persuade Red Bull’s Remco Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz to start their season on the island in January.

Both Paris-Nice and the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes featured team time trials under the same rules that will be in play in Barcelona on Saturday, which offered a competitive test run. And most teams have availed of the opportunity for collective training in the discipline in the run-up to the Tour.

Preparations for the discipline have been very public, then, but on the eve of the Tour, it was striking that most teams were decidedly cagey about discussing their tactics for Saturday’s opening time trial.

The guiding principle for a conventional team time trial was, as Chris Boardman often put it, that you were only as strong as your weakest rider. But while that maxim was sound in a team time trial where the clock stopped on the fourth or fifth rider across the line, the approach is subtly different for this test. 

This team time trial essentially evolves into a high-speed lead-out for the strongest riders or the GC leaders in each outfit. The preferred finishing configuration for most teams is clear, but it will be fascinating to see the variations in tactical approach to get to that endpoint.

Netcompany-Ineos director of racing Geraint Thomas was reticent to shed any light on his team’s approach to that conundrum.

“Obviously there’s been a lot of thought and a lot of discussion about the best strategy, and working back from the finish, you need a finisher that’s able to go up that last climb quickly,” Thomas said this week.

“But I don’t think now is the time to discuss our strategy. It’s something we’ve put a lot of effort into. We’ve got a lot of boffins to put in their numbers and data and their thought, and we’ve got the coaching angle as well as the DS side of things as well, with the actual experience of doing it. We blend all that together and we come up with the ideal strategy.”

Remco Evenepoel was similarly circumspect when asked about Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s formation, and specifically about which riders would sit in front of him and behind him in the pace-line through the opening kilometres.

“I mean, you guys were at the training, so if you look at the pictures, you can see it, probably,” Evenepoel said on Thursday evening.

“I can’t say anything about it, because that would bring out the race strategy a bit, but you will see. The start order is harder to talk about, and then the finish order is well, the order we finish in, so…”

That is the nub of the matter. This is a collective effort that produces an individual result, and even if the time gaps shouldn’t be irretrievable, it’s a chance to land a psychological blow all the same. 

Much focus will be on Evenepoel, and not only because the world champion has a chance to wear the yellow jersey for the first time in his career. This is also his first race since Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the first chance to see if his two months of work with new coach Tim Heemskerk have begun to pay dividends. 

And above all, it’s an effort that produces some sparks in the internal leadership contest at Red Bull. Evenepoel and Florian Lipowitz have presented an amiably united front. The dual-pronged approach to the Tour was announced in December, but it will be each man for himself on the kilometre-long haul to the line at Montjuïc on Saturday.

There will be similar intrigue about Lidl-Trek’s approach to the finale, though Juan Ayuso and Mattias Skjelmose dovetailed quite well in the discipline at the Dauphiné in June. Late addition Derek Gee-West, meanwhile, was clear about his role on Saturday.

“My job might be just to be another cog,” Gee-West smiled. “We were doing TTT training and it’s pretty impressive the legs these guys have. I think for me it’s just about rolling through, keeping it going and helping them do their thing. The objective is to win, or to finish as high as possible.”

Over at UAE Team Emirates-XRG, the leadership hierarchy is already defined, but Isaac del Toro is something more than a luxury domestique for Tadej Pogačar. If the Mexican can live with Pogačar’s inevitable onslaught on the final kick to the line, it will be a sure sign that UAE have two potential podium finishers in their line-up.

For Visma | Lease a Bike, winners of the team time trial at the Dauphiné, the exercise is straightforward. Men like Victor Campenaerts and Matteo Jorgenson will be charged with helping Jonas Vingegaard get to the foot of Montjuïc as smoothly as possible before he unleashes his effort on the final ramps.

The approach should be similar at Decathlon CMA CGM, though the squad will hope for better than their relatively subdued showing at the Dauphiné. And the final kick to the line will be an early examination for debutant Paul Seixas after his crash on the final weekend of that race.

It all adds up to a team time trial unlike any other previously seen at the Tour, even if Geraint Thomas wryly noted that some aspects of the discipline remain unchanged: “As we all know, it never goes to plan anyway.”

Roll on Saturday.

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