Stage Seven

 

It was as if I was chasing a break trying to get to Saint-Pardoux-la-Rivière in time for the stage finish.  I was giving it an extra level of exertion despite the heat and the rolling terrain all the while monitoring the time just as the chasing peloton monitors their speed as they chip away at the time gap they must overcome, which they invariably do.  I was confident, too, that I could reach my destination by five and was holding something in reserve in case I needed to speed up.

I rolled into Saint-Pardoux-la-Rivière by five and began my search for a bar.  The only one was a PMU bar whose lone television was restricted to horse racing.  I filled two of my water bottles with the ice cold water from the bar tap and went across the street to the Hotel de Ville hoping it had Wi-Fi.  One never knows if a town will have public Wi-Fi and this one did.  

When I connected I went straight to the Letour website, as it has better graphics than the cyclingnews website.  It was two kilometers to the finish.  I had cut it perilously close.  I didn’t even have time to scroll back and see how the stage had unfolded.  I just had to wait a couple of moments to learn Philipson had won his third sprint finish of this year’s Tour and that he had chased down Cavendish who had opened up his sprint earlier than usual, trying something different.  It almost worked, as he finished second, the thirty-second time he has fallen just short in a Tour sprint. 

 

Philipson, who is ten years younger than Cavendish and who has said Cavendish was one of his childhood heroes along with Sagan and Boonen, afterwards said he would like to see Cavendish break the record he shares with Merckx, but not so much to let up just a little so he could have done it on this stage.  

Cavendish had to have had mixed feelings of disappointment and encouragement at coming so close, but at least gaining a  bolster of confidence  that Philipson isn’t necessarily invincible.  He most definitely has a chance of a win before The Tour ends in two weeks.  It is now one third over.

Cavendish is the elder of The Tour.  His fourteen Tours are the most of anyone in the race, one more than Boasson Hagen and two more than Sagan.  The most all-time by anyone is eighteen by the French rider Sylvain Chavanal, one more than George Hincapie, Stuart O’Grady and Jens Voigt of the US, Australia and Germany, all overlapping with my two decades of riding The Tour.  

Each of them rode their Tours in consecutive years, Chavanal 200l to 2018.  My eighteen have come with an initial sixteen straight starting in 2004, broken by the delayed 2020 Covid Tour, revived in 2021 with my seventeenth, then broken again last year as I missed the Copenhagen start. Here I am, back for my eighteenth in twenty years.  Will I have enough left in me to surpass Chavanal next year?

As I continued riding the Stage Eight route that I had begun the evening before, now just a day ahead of the peloton, I was hoping to latch on to others riding the stage as I’ve done in years past.  But the only cyclists I encountered was a group of six fast-riding, husky, middle-aged men all wearing different jerseys and followed by a support vehicle with Dutch license plates and spare bikes on the roof.  Evidently my eight a.m. start fifteen miles into the stage wasn't early enough to encounter others, as Ralph finally met up with a swarm of them in Limoges at the end of the stage and later that evening the hotel he ended up in Saint-Leonard-de-Noblat, the start of Stage Nine, was packed with them.

The urge to decorate and mount bikes along the route and to honor The Tour in some manner continues to possess the French.  I was once again rewarded with a dazzling array of clever and inventive decorations from hay bale concoctions to jerseys hung on a bush to embellished bicycles and a pyramid of bikes and a stunningly artistic owl with a bright yellow beak and bicycle wheels as eyes.

All along the route were signs reminding all that the week-long Tour de France Femmes will include this stage on July 25. One of these years it would be nice to stick around after The Tour de France Hommes and have an extra-week of biking in France following the women.