Tour de France Blog Series: Part 1

While baseball fans look forward to October and college hoops fans to March, I look forward every year to July because of the glorious Tour de France! In this series of posts, I hope to teach as much as I can about all the intricate strategies involved in the Tour de France. Perhaps you're curious about pro cycling or you're just on the Lance Armstrong bandwagon, but whatever the case is, I hope these posts will encourage you to follow and enjoy the Tour this year.

Before I get under way, I'd like to make a disclaimer that I myself am not a racer, nor do I follow many other cycling events more than cursorily. So if anyone more knowledgeable notices anything wrong or missing, I'd appreciate any input.

Anyway, if my train of thought goes as planned, this series will be divided into five posts (this one being counted as the first):

• Intro, Part 1: About the Tour and why it's more than just people pedaling
• Intro, Part 2: The Tour's classifications & cycling as a team sport
• Tactical Racing: The peloton, drafting, and attacking
• The Stages: All the different types and the 1-day strategies involved
• Overall Strategy: 3-week strategies to win the coveted jerseys

Then if this series of posts goes well, I plan to continue blogging throughout this year's Tour with a preview of this year's course along with quasi-daily updates with commentary on what we've seen and what we can expect on the following stage.

Now let's get started!

*****

Le Tour: Le Awesome!

The Tour de France is the world's most famous cycling race and is held every July. Although there are many other races in the professional cycling calendar, the Tour carries with it the most prestige and the richest history of any competition. The modern Tour de France takes place over the course of 23 days, with 21 days of racing and a mere 2 days of rest, and takes riders around France and its neighbors, passing through the tall and steep Alps and the notoriously rugged and dangerous Pyrenees along the way, and ending along the historic Champs-Elysées in Paris. The course changes every year, and this year 22 teams of 9 riders each (so... 198 riders) will start in Rotterdam and take the clockwise route around France that goes through the Alps first and the Pyrenees second.

One unfamiliar with cycling may assume the race is just a matter of which person is most fit, which often is the case in other racing sports like running, swimming, and long-track speed skating. However, cycling races are most similar to short-track speed skating, where fitness is obviously important, but strategy and tactics are equally as important.

The complex dynamics of the Tour arise largely because of three things:

1. Cycling is a team sport, with the team (in most cases) riding strategically to maximize the advantage of an individual team member.
2. Although every competitor rides the same race, there are several different competitions covering different aspects (i.e. specialties) of cycling.
3. Different teams have different goals and formulate their strategy according to which competition(s) they aim to win.

Throughout this blog series, I will elaborate on these team dynamics and strategies. Even though the physical feat of completing the Tour let alone winning it is incredible, for me it's these strategies that make the Tour exciting to follow. The next installment of this series will get a lot of the (important) formal info about the race out of the way, as we learn about all the different classifications (competitions) in the Tour, as well as the structure of a team. Hopefully from there though, things will get really interesting. Stay tuned!