Le Tour Basics
The race starts on 2 July on the Passage du Gois and will finish on 24 July in Paris, so I thought I should explain some of what I’ll be ranting about.
The cartoon characters from my header are wearing the various colored jerseys that indicate the leader in the different classifications in the race.
The Maillot Jaune, Yellow Jersey is worn by the rider with the lowest time overall in the race. The eventual winner of the race may never have come in first in any stage, but was near the lead throughout the race and achieved the lowest time over the entire course of the event. The winner is normally an “all-arounder”, someone is very good at the sprints and the hill climbing, even if they aren’t the best. Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador, and Fabian Cancellara are “all-arouders”, showing up on the lists of the sprinters and the climbers, while staying in the top ten for overall time.
The Maillot Vert, Green Jersey, is for the speed demons, the sprinters. The guys who hit the highest gears on the bike. They are the flat-out, flat land fliers, reaching suicidal speeds. They win points for sprints on certain portions of the course. The top sprinters tend to be found in the back of the overall times because good sprinters tend to be lousy climbers.
The Maillot À Pois, Polka Dot Jersey, is for the climbers. The hills on the course are assigned levels of difficulty, and points are assigned based on finishing order at the top. Once the course reaches the mountains, the points really start to climb. The best climbers are those that high strength to weight ratios. These are the guys who are comfortable in the low gears, but manage to be one gear higher than everyone else.
The Maillot Blanc, White Jersey, is worn by the young rider with the lowest overall time. To be eligible you can’t have reached your 26th birthday on 1 January of this year. If a young rider qualifies for the Yellow Jersey, the White Jersey goes to the second fastest young rider.
The Tour has 22 teams of 9 riders each for a total of 198. Every rider wears a number on his back. The first two digits indicate the rider’s team, i.e. Radio Shack riders are 07-, Quick Step riders are 12-.
The normal bib is black numbers on a white background, but the lead team wears black numbers on a yellow background, and the most combative rider gets white numbers on a red background the next day. On the Tour, combative means someone who makes their own breaks and goes for the lead from the peloton, the large mass of riders.
Now that I’ve explained all this stuff, you still don’t care, but I feel better. This is a war, not a ride in the park. At this level the riders are not nice people, but some are nastier than others, and the really good riders don’t get caught. It’s a lot like NASCAR, but with less pollution.
5 comments
Okay it has been tainted with drug scandals in recent years but Le Tour is truly at the pinnacle of sporting events
If the Tour de France is NASCAR with bicycles, does that mean that people watch it mostly in hopes of seeing a massive bicycle pileup? 😈
It is definitely a test of endurance, Jams, getting up day after day to hop on that bike and ride.
Badtux, there was wall-to-wall coverage when Lance Armstrong got his handlebars snagged by the strap of a spectator’s tote bad and bled all over the road. They come limping in covered with bruises and blood stains. Oh, yes, there is definitely a group that wants to see the crashes that happen in every race, and people do die in the races. They draft and bump, just like NASCAR, and they do it on regular roads, not banked tracks. Last year part of the race was on cobblestones that were wet.
“This is a war, not a ride in the park.”
😆 Yeah… ain’t dat da truth! 😈
It might not be up to the standard of US professional sports, but there is major money involved in the races, and those bicycles cost as much as most of the cars I’ve owned in my life.
The amazing thing is that they haven’t figured out how to charge admission.