Key Takeaways: Tour de France Stage 1

Breaking down what we learned at the highly-unusual opening stage of the 2024 Tour de France

Jun 29, 2024

On the scorching-hot slopes of the Apennines between Florence and Rimini in Central Italy, Romain Bardet completed a fairytale ride to win the opening stage of the 2024 Tour de France and take the race’s and his career’s inaugural Yellow Jersey, which came at the end of a perfectly executed tactical clinic from him and his dsm-firmenich PostNL team. After the UAE/Visma-led peloton pulled the breakaway, which contained DSM teammate Frank van den Broek, within touching distance with nearly fifty kilometers remaining, Bardet took advantage of the unusual opening-stage rhythm by attacking to quickly bridge up to Van den Broek. Bardet, working with his teammate to build up a significant advantage through the remaining climbs, barely maintained it to hold off the peloton on the flat headwind finishing kilometers. With a messy collection of fast GC contenders like Tadej Pogačar and versatile sprinters like Mads Pedersen and Wout van Aert fighting for position at the front of the group, and nobody’s team willing to go all-in on the chase, the peloton found themselves foiled by a team with a laser-focused plan.

Beyond the dsm-firmenich PostNL masterclass, the stage was marked by hot weather and hard racing that saw a large number of strong riders dropped by the pace-setting of Tadej Pogačar’s UAE team. However, as soon as it was clear the pace wasn’t enough to expose cracks in the form of any serious GC contenders, they threw in the towel and let the Visma-Lease a Bike team of the defending champion Jonas Vingegaard take control of the pacemaking. While Vingegaard stayed out-of-sight and safely tucked in his teammates' wheels for the entire day, he passed his first test since coming back from his injuries in April with flying colors and appears to be at this Tour as a viable challenger for the overall title.

Stage 1 Top Five:
1) Romain Bardet (dsm-firmenich PostNL) +0
2) Frank van den Broek (dsm-firmenich PostNL) +0
3) Wout van Aert (Visma-Lease a Bike) +5
4) Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) +5
5) Maxim Van Gils (Lotto Dstny) +5

Current GC Top Five:
1) Romain Bardet (dsm-firmenich PostNL) +0
2) Frank van den Broek (dsm-firmenich PostNL) +4
3) Wout van Aert (Visma-Lease a Bike) +11
4) Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) +15
5) Maxim Van Gils (Lotto Dstny) +15

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Stage 1 Race Notebook

BTP is seamlessly following every twist and turn of the 2024 Tour de France with the fantastic Tour Tracker app (iPhone/Android/Web)

189.9km-to-go: After a fast, full-of-attacking start to the stage, a small and incredibly elite group gets clear. DSM’s Frank van den Broek is in the move, which, at the time, doesn’t seem noteworthy but, over time, proves to be one of the most critical points of the race. Due to the group containing no GC threats, Tadej Pogačar’s UAE team lets the gap quickly blow out to over five minutes. Somewhat oddly, EF, who hasn’t sent anyone in the move, eventually takes up the pacemaking duties behind.

153.5km: The consistently high pace and extremely hot temperatures (38c/99f) quickly take a toll on the peloton. The conditions are so harsh that legendary sprinter Mark Cavendish is falling visibly ill due to the heat, which forces almost his entire Astana team to drop back to pace him and ensure he doesn't miss the tie cut (Cavendish eventually recovered and safely made the cut).

72km: On the first of the two most challenging climbs of the stage, UAE puts their team on the front and sets a tough pace. However, while the pace is high and a large number of strong riders are being dropped from both the peloton and the breakaway, UAE fails to distance any rival GC contenders and begins to lose key domestiques. Additionally, their backup GC options, like Juan Ayuso and João Almeida, look mildly under pressure due to their own team’s pacesetting.

50.6km: On the following climb, realizing they are unlikely to make significant time gains and only risk thinning down their own options, UAE sits up as Jonas Vingegaard’s Visma comes to the front. With the sustained gradient the steepest they have been all day and the breakaway within reach, Romain Bardet winds up, attacks, and immediately gets a massive gap. His teammate, Van den Broek, is currently just over a minute up the road.

49km: In just over a kilometer, Bardet bridges the gap to his teammate, who has smartly sat up to wait for him, and the two head off in pursuit of the leaders.

40.7km: With Visma unbothered by Bardet’s presence out front and the two DSM riders riding extremely fast up, they quickly pull their gap out to close to 90 seconds.

25km: Van den Broek pulls Bardet over the final climb as EF resumes pulling in the group behind for reasons of highly debatable validity. The peloton quickly loses time, and the gap increases to 1'40.

18km-8km: With the two leaders holding an extremely high pace near 70km/hr, they are able to keep their time loss to the peloton to roughly 4 seconds per kilometer, meaning that at this rate, they should be able to hold on for the win by eight seconds. Behind, Lidl-Trek is pacing, but not in a fully committed sense, as they are holding a few riders in reserve.

6.3km: With the peloton’s time-taking rate on the breakaway decreasing as they get nearer to the line (1.8 seconds per km), Visma puts Matteo Jorgenson, one of their GC options, on the front to help reel in the escapees. This signals that Van Aert must feel incredibly confident in his ability to win the stage and take the race lead if they are having Jorgenson burn valuable matches this early in the race.

1km: Coming under the final kilometer and the gap still over ten seconds, the win is in the bag for the leaders. Notice how close the TV moto is to the duo, which is giving them a significant draft at such extremely high speeds.

Finish: Bardet comes over the finish line slightly ahead of his teammate Van den Broek to comfortably take a monumental stage win ahead of the chasing peloton, as well as the first Yellow Jersey of his career in his final Tour de France appearance. Behind, Wout van Aert wins the sprint for third ahead of Tadej Pogačar to take the final four-second time bonus seconds off the table (Van Aert was crying after the stage due to being so happy he was able to recover well enough from his crashes this spring to contest the stage).

Three Key Takeaways

1) Romain Bardet & DSM Outsmarted & Outplanned the Rest of the Peloton: The 33-year-old Bardet bagged a fairytale win due to a ride that was as tactically perfect as it was physically impressive. After his DSM team deftly stashed Frank van den Broek in the early breakaway, Bardet sat patiently and waited for the high pace of UAE to pull them within reach before launching a well-timed attack at the perfect part of the course to join up with his teammate and ride clear for the win. While this sounds simple enough, the beauty of Bardet and DSM’s win is that a lot still had to go their way to make this win fall into place.

For one, Van den Broek had to be strong enough to get into the breakaway, and then still have enough gas in the tank after Bardet made the bridge to pull him clear of the rest of the breakaway and be strong enough while sharing turns to hold off the hard-chasing peloton. Lucky for Bardet, the 23-year-old Van den Broek is an absurdly strong, if not slightly raw, prospect the team has smartly brought on from their development squad.
- After that, Bardet had to be strong enough to make the quick bridge to his teammate and lay down enough power on the long, flat section to the finish line to hold off the sprinters.
  - But, most importantly, Bardet and DSM had to hope that the dominant GC teams would consider their rivals too strong to be dislodged to merit riding all-out on the climbs and the top of the final climb too far from the finish to attempt a solo attack since either one would have resulted in their time gap plunging to dangerously low levels.
For the DSM team, a modestly budgeted squad that prides itself on carving out advantages in places others overlook, this was almost the platonic ideal of a perfect result. After all, it came as the by-product of perfectly executed tactics by a criminally underrated veteran and up-and-coming young talent who worked together to go 1-2 on the opening stage of the season's biggest race.
- With the high level and extreme well-roundedness required to compete in modern GC competitions, Bardet’s tenure in the Yellow Jersey won’t last until Paris, but he, even in his final season (he finished 2nd at Liège–Bastogne–Liège) is still a deceptively strong rider that could hold onto Yellow for a longer-than-expected period of time.

2) Jonas Vingegaard & Visma Pass Their First Major Test: While the hard racing through challenging terrain and conditions undoubtedly added currently unseen fatigue to the legs of the GC contenders, the name of the game today, partly due to the extreme heat making racing attritional versus attacking, was minimizing mistakes and avoiding time loses.

Considering that Jonas Vingegaard was in his first race back from his terrible Basque Country crash in April, that he wasn’t phased by UAE’s testing pace, and that his Visma team felt comfortable enough in his condition to take up pacemaking themselves, tells us that he is likely stronger than I initially expected.
Of course, we are only one day into a twenty-one-day race, and there is a lot of racing left to tackle, but, at least for today, Vingegaard and Visma looked unshakeable and almost appeared excited to answer the chatter about their current dismal state and the rise of their rivals UAE as the preeminent GC superteam.
- Outside of Vingegaard’s disrupted preparation leading to a late-race capitulation, one strange dynamic at play on the resurgent Visma squad was nobody dropping back to help pace Jonas Vingegaard back into the peloton after an early bike change, and either team management or Wout van Aert personally, putting Critérium du Dauphiné runner-up, and outside GC threat, Matteo Jorgenson on the front to potentially set up a Van Aert stage win in the late kilometers of the stage.
  - With two major stars looking mostly back from significant injuries, it is already clear there are conflicting priorities between them and Jorgenson, who has thrived in their absence, and it isn’t clear how these priorities will mesh as the race goes on.

3) Tadej Pogačar & UAE Raced With an Unusual Level of Strategic Forethought While Being Slightly Humbled: After years of playing the constant showman, Pogačar finally appeared to play the strategic long game today by pulling his team off the front and sitting in the group to the finish line, in lieu of a long-range solo attack after it was obvious that the only rider he considers a real rival, Vingegaard, wasn’t going to be dropped by his team’s pacemaking. This might have disappointed some and had others already questioning Pogačar’s dominance, but this passivity shows massive improvement in his race-reading abilities and an increased emphasis on not burning unnecessary energy early in a three-week-long race, which is something Pogačar has struggled with in recent losses to Vingegaard.

With the climbs being relatively short and the final climb cresting over 20 kilometers from the finish line, there was almost no chance of making significant time with a long-range attack, and any time gained would have been offset by the massive energy expenditure required to take it.
One notable blemish on Pogačar’s day was his UAE team, which, just days after being anointed the sport’s strongest GC team, showed significant cracks on today’s stage.
- For example, while they made the right choice by backing off the pacemaking after it was clear neither Primož Roglič nor Jonas Vingegaard would be dropped, they did so after burning their key domestiques, and two of their GC options, Juan Ayuso and João Almeida, appeared to be under pressure.
  - While the team had nothing to gain in this specific instance by continuing to drive the pace at the expense of Ayuso and Almeida since keeping them as high in the GC for as long as possible only gives them more options to press Vingegaard and Roglič, it laid bare the Tour de France inexperience of both riders and potentially gave us a sneak preview of difficult decisions the team will have to make in harder stages down the road.

Stage 2 Preview

Tomorrow’s stage serves up another long, 200+ kilometer day of racing with significant climbing features. Stage two cuts through the plains of Emilia-Romagna towards Bologna before serving up two passes of the brutally steep San Luca climb before a scorching fast 10-kilometer run to the finish line. With bonus seconds on offer on the second summit of San Luca and the climb hard enough to create gaps large enough that can be sustained to the finish line, look for a mini-showdown between the GC contenders in the final kilometers of the stage.

The shortness of the climbs will keep any potential time gaps small, but the punchy finish should give us a sneak preview of exactly where each rider’s fitness is.
Prediction: Tadej Pogačar and Primož Roglič leverage their punchy ability to go clear on the climb before working together to the finish line to take time on Vingegaard before Pogačar wins the sprint. However, Romain Bardet is close enough in the group behind to hold the Yellow Jersey.