stop for the Frenchman Romain Bardet

Since "the step (le) ] feeds and not the result " then Roman Bardet will find in this Tour de France to drink and eat. The Frenchman of the AG2R La Mondiale team suffered a thousand ills Wednesday in the climb of the Col du Portet, the very one where he imagined, before the start of the Tour de France, that the yellow jersey would be played and that he would be in the shot to put on. In fact what he saw dropped 6 kilometers from the summit on a relay Wout Poels: the best French Tour put to death by the fourth roped Sky team. Hit by hypoglycemia, Bardet ended up with courage, in the wheel of Alejandro Valverde, nearly two minutes away from the yellow jersey Geraint Thomas that he was still accompanying before the race exceeded the mileage of 2000 meters. "It's very unfortunate but you have to accept said, in the pastures, the eighth overall I had good legs on the stage but I felt that I was running out of sugar on the last climb; I had headaches, I was completely bridled. »

See also:
        
    
                Tour de France: And Froome became a "perfect teammate"
    

Even a hypothetical victory on Friday, for the last mountain leg, would not forget this Tour where nothing went as planned for Bardet. At 27, on a course that would suit him, he dared for the first time to dream aloud of a final victory in Paris. After two podiums, it is a first stop in an ascension career, where the Auvergnat cohabit the boxes to lead him to victory on the Tour, "step by step", as they say in the management school of which he is a graduate. He had also prepared that one day, the collective adventure he embodies turns out badly. Last November: "The number of times I pbaded on the verge of disaster on this race … Everything is not dependent on my will.

Latour is not yet the next generation

"It's a weird Tour for us" admits his coach Jean-Baptiste Quiclet, who tries to understand. He counts the lost seconds; they spun like in an hourglbad, in small grains, ineluctably. Collective weakness in the team time trial, mechanical problem in Mûr-de-Bretagne, tactical foul at La Rosière, leg breakdown at Mende and then at the Col du Portet. "This is a particular Tour because of the speed of the tempos, the management of the Sky team that uses and does not allow to do much. But that does not make the overall project collapse. No objective element makes me say that we missed the turn.

The AG2R La Mondiale team, undeniably made an all-right, reduced to five men after the mid-Tour. The contrast is striking between the conquering collective of the 2017 Tour de France, the only attempt to destabilize the frozen pattern imposed by the Sky, and that of 2018, dismembered, disoriented, badly inspired.

"Romain Bardet is our leader and we focuses on him. We must trust him "

Romain Bardet considers his conquest of the Tour as that of the international market by an SME: he claims total collective involvement and the same professionalism as the Sky, nothing less than a cultural revolution for a French team born 26 years ago. He had neither of these three weeks, where the mechanical problems in the team were numerous, including in the stage of Roubaix where the three punctures were not due only to the bad luck, but also to an insufficient number of hoses adapted to paving stones. Cracks appeared here and there in the varnish of a formation welded around a man, individual initiatives like those, it seemed, Pierre Latour, laughing white jersey. "Latour, there's still work, Vincent Lavenu, the manager, left Portet. It is necessary to channel one's energy if one day one wants to make good general rankings. Romain Bardet is our leader and we focus on him. We must trust him. When you invest yourself like Roman, it will automatically walk again. »