Slippery customers

The 2017 edition of the Tour began on a rainy day in Düsseldorf. If that sounds like an obscure Pogues B-Side, have no fear, it’s not. What it is is a recipe for a TT that was at once disastrously dangerous and incredibly dull to watch. You see, most of the GC men clearly felt that it was far too slippery out on the course to really risk attacking the turns, while the relatively short length (just 14km) meant riding conservatively would not lose you too much time. So the majority of riders took it very easy. None more so than Rigoberto Uran, who got it in the neck a bit from the Twitterati.

Uran taking every precaution short of getting off the bike and walking through these corners.

— Cyclocosm.com (@Cyclocosm) July 1, 2017

This caution was all well and good, but it did make for some terribly boring TV. And lets not forget, every, single, minute of the stage was televised.

Hoping to bring some pep to proceedings and maybe steal a match on their rivals, some riders did go for it. And they almost all immediately crashed.

Skinny winnies

There was some consternation among certain teams after stage one, particularly focused on the special white skinsuits being used by Team Sky for the ITT. Surprisingly, the objections were not due to white lycra’s tendency to go a bit see-through in the wet, but rather that they gave the Sky riders some kind of unfair advantage.

With Welshman, Geraint Thomas, winning the stage for Sky, plus Vsail Kiryienka, Chris Froome and Michal Kwiatkowski all in the top eight, it certainly seemed like the British team was doing something right.

The skinsuits, so the story goes, are designed for riding in the wet and could give an advantage of as much as 20 seconds to the rider over a 14km TT. The race jury did not uphold the complaint, made by FDJ, about the skinsuits in the end, proving that ‘being well prepared for the conditions’ is not against the rules of the Tour de France. Not yet, at least.

Bernie’s on balloon watch

This GIF is perhaps the most magical moving image I have seen come out of a bike race. We’ll never know exactly what was going through Bernie Eisel’s head in this moment. In truth, we don’t even know how he came to be holding these balloons. The conventional wisdom says he darted ahead of the peloton to clear an obstacle out of the path of the oncoming bunch, but some of us, we choose to believe the unconventional.

Could Bernie be carrying these balloons as a gift to his wife, or more intriguingly, a secret squeeze who lives in Liege? Did he individually inflate all of them himself as something to do on a dismally dull first half of stage two? Did the balloons belong to the Orica-Scott rider seen at the beginning of the shot and Bernie has stolen them like a playground bully?

We will never know. Unless we ask him. I guess someone could just ask him.