Neal Rogers’ Tour de France Notebook, stage 1

You’ve read the race report. You’ve looked at the results. Now here are some stage 1 observations from the mind of managing editor Neal Rogers.

• The crowds along the route of Sunday’s stage from Rotterdam to Brussels were incredible. It was a warm, sunny weekend day, traveling through two passionate cycling nations, and it was as if everyone that’s ever ridden a bike came out to watch the world’s bike race.

Several times on the drive through Holland we wondered aloud how the peloton would fit through the throngs of people. My colleague, European correspondent Andy Hood — who has been covering all major European races since 1996 — said they were likely the biggest crowds at a bike race he’d ever seen.

The massive crowds actually may have been too big. HTC-Columbia’s ace lead-out man Mark Renshaw, who went for the stage win after Mark Cavendish hit the deck with 2km to go, said the crowds made the racing “beyond dangerous.”

“We were trying to race through those roads at three abreast, and we couldn’t do that,” Renshaw said. “(The crowds) were unbelievable for the Tour, but absolutely too dangerous. There were guys going down every five minutes. There were points we were riding 10 to 15 kilometers an hour, and they were still crashing.”

• Waiting for Chris Horner outside the RadioShack team bus this morning, I witnessed firsthand, in the blazing sun, that the team meeting this morning lasted for nearly 30 minutes. That seemed a little disproportionate to me, for what was expected to be a flat, field-sprint stage, until Horner explained that the meeting had touched on Saturday’s prologue results as well as the difficult stages 1 and 2. Check out the Horner Diary video to hear him expand on the RadioShack team meetings, and if and when he interjects his own views into the tactics of a powerful team alongside Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel.

While I waited for Horner, there was a scary moment when a young boy fainted before the riders had exited the bus following the team meeting. His father, I presume, brought the child’s limp body up to the fenced off area in front of the team bus, where team staff quickly brought them both in, put the boy in the shade, elevated his feet and gave him water. It was a long, scary 30 to 45 seconds or so before the kid came back to, and another few minutes before he was back on his feet. But by the time I left he was wearing a new RadioShack team cap, sipping water, still inside the team’s roped-off area, and, I expect, about to meet Lance Armstrong.

After the stage, in his oregonlive.com column, Horner wrote that four of Armstrong’s top lieutenants had gone down Sunday — some more than once. Jani Brajkovic crashed and bruised both knees, and Andreas Kloden crashed twice but appears to be OK. With Leipheimer and Horner also banged up, Sunday was a tough day for Radio Shack.

“I’ve got my fingers crossed for tomorrow morning,” Horner wrote, “because if things get worse during the night then we could potentially already have four riders out of the race.”

Who expected that Sunday’s opening road stage could have had such an impact on the next few pivotal stages?

• Lloyd Mondory, the AG2R rider who took out Tyler Farrar’s rear wheel, scraped his ass badly on that crash. Poor guy had to walk around the finish line with an entire butt cheek not only rubbed raw, but fully exposed, and, as he walked to his team bus, was holding the torn fabric in the air, so it wouldn’t touch the raw skin.

• You’ve gotta love that there was a town along the route called Boom, and that Lars Boom was in the breakaway at the time they passed through.

• Rumor is that Sky’s Bradley Wiggins is feeling the pressure that comes with being the leader of his new, big-budget British team. Stories floated through the pressroom in Rotterdam that Wiggins was riding sub-par at a training camp in the Pyrenees just 10 days before the Tour, and was spotted sulking over his poor form relative to his teammates. Never one to gel with the media, Wiggins reportedly spiked a sparsely attended Team Sky pre-race press conference Friday with his short, terse answers; word is the entire gathering only lasted five minutes. During the team presentation that evening in Rotterdam, Wiggins bristled at the announcer’s admittedly lame questions, appearing smug and sullen. I hope it’s not true that Wiggo is already mentally cracked, as I enjoyed watching his surprise rise to the top of the GC last year, even if he became less and less fun to speak with as the race went on. But I can’t help but wonder now if last year’s breakthrough performance wasn’t, in part, because he’d entered the race with no expectations. Time will tell …

• What’s the story with Garmin’s all-orange helmets? They look like giant Tic Tacs. What was wrong with the orange, silver and blue argyle helmets they used to wear? I’m a big fan of Giro helmets, but those orange lids look B-A-D.

• Wiggins’ Sky teammate Serge Pauwels was given a little leash to ride ahead of the peloton through his hometown area of Edegem, 45km from the finish. Very cool tradition in the Tour.

• Sunday’s stage 1 used some of the same roads as the Paris-Brussels one-day classic. Monday’s stage 2 uses several climbs from Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Tuesday’s stage 3 uses seven cobblestone sections used in Paris-Roubaix. All three of those one-day classics are owned by Tour de France organizers Amaury Sport Organisation. Coincidence? More like an ASO highlights reel …

FILED UNDER: Tour de France TAGS: Opinion / Stage1

Neal Rogers

An interest in all things rock 'n' roll led Neal into music journalism while attending UC Santa Cruz. After several post-grad years spent waiting tables, surfing and mountain biking, Neal moved to San Francisco, working stints as a bike messenger and at a software start-up. He moved to Colorado in 2001, taking an editorial internship at VeloNews. He never left, and is now Velo's editor in chief. When not traveling the world covering races, Neal can be found riding his bike, skiing, cooking, or attending a concert. Follow him on Twitter at @nealrogers.

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