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.

Tour de France Primer Part 1

For the Tour de France newcomer, there are probably a ton of questions relating to the event ranging from how do you win, to what do the different colour jerseys signify.

I’d like to provide a series of brief, easy to read tutorials for the interested reader to transform into a longtime fan. The first lesson is pretty basic.

The tour is a bicycle race held primarily in France starting the first weekend of July, and running for 21 days. There are other races, but the Tour de France is the grand daddy of them all. Here are some facts about the tour to help understand what you are watching on the TV.

1. The winner is the finisher with the best overall time at the end of the event.

2. The race route changes every year, but always finishes in Paris along the Champs Elysees.

3. The race is broken into stages which mostly travel from point to point, although some stages, usually time trials, start and finish at the same location.

4. There is 1 stage per day, for the entire 21, with the exception of two rest days, usually scheduled after the second and third weekends.

5. Besides the overall winner, there are other prestigious competitions within the race including the sprinters challenge, and the King of the Mountains.

6. Although the race takes place primarily in France, it does cross over borders into other countries in some of the stages. This years race ends stage 17, and begins stage 18 in the Italian town of Pinerolo

That’s some of the basics, but stay tuned, there is still a lot more to come.