Tour de France Primer, Making Time

This post is key to understanding how someone wins the Tour. Riders gain a time advantage, and move up the standings in two ways.
1. During Time Trials
2. During breakaways where gaps form between groups of riders



First the groups.
Each stage that is not a time trial, starts with a mass group called the Peloton. That main group rides together in a pack. At the end of the stage, everyone in peloton gets the same time regardless if they are the first rider in the peloton to cross the line, or the last.

If the peloton splits into several groups, each group gets it’s own time, but each rider in that group gets the groups time. If a single rider or a small group of riders breaks away and finishes before the Peloton, every rider in that breakaway group gets the same time.

2 Riders try to Breakaway from the main group.

If it sound confusing, bear with me, and read on.

If the entire peloton finished stage 1 together in 2 hours flat, then the time for every rider in the race would be 2:00:00. All 198 riders would be tied for first place overall in the general classification.

If 1 rider broke away from the Peloton, and finished in 1 hour 59 minutes, that would be his time, and he would lead the general classification by 1 minute, while every other rider would be tied for second.

In the case of this years tour, stage 1 saw a massive crash smack dab in the middle of the peloton, and front half of the pelaton kept going, while riders in or behind the crash became separated. This happened just as the sprinters were ramping up to prepare for the sprint finish, so the riders caught behind, including defending champion Alberto Contadore, could not catch the front group, and ended up finishing more than a minute behind.

Breakaways are often tried, but rarely successful in flat stages, however, once the tour hits the mountains, riders have an opportunity to gain significant time on their rivals. That’s what makes the mountains so important.

Next the Time Trials
Rider versus clock plain and simple. These are stages where each rider starts on their own, and rides for time. This is where we see the cool aerodynamic helmets, and frames, and skin suits. Some years also have a team timetrial where the teams ride as a group in a line. Again the team gets the same time, but riders on good teams can gain time advantages over rivals on weaker teams.

Lance Armstrong in the 2009 TDF Time Trial.

Lance was a good climber, as well as a good time trialist, and most years also had an awesome team. That’s what made him so good.