Tour de France Blog Series: Part 5

At last we've reached the last installment of this exciting blog series!  This post completes my primer on cycling and the Tour de France.  For the first four parts of the blog series, follow these links:

1. Introduction
2. TdF Classifications & Cycling as a Team Sport
3. Fundamental Cycling Tactics
4. TdF Stage Types & Single-Day Strategies

This final chapter is very short and will focus on overarching strategies that teams and individuals will employ over the course of the entire three weeks of racing as they compete for the prestigious colored jerseys.  So without further ado...

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To win any of the jerseys in the Tour de France requires not only a strong rider, but also a well-planned strategy.  A cyclist has a limited amount of energy he can expend over the course of three weeks, as well as a limit to what he can do over a shorter period of time before having to take it easy.  Therefore, a cyclist and his team's directeur sportif will study the Tour's course to determine what the rider should do on each stage.

Before commenting on these strategies - a word on the general profile of the Tour.  The Tour begins with a short time trial called a prologue, though in a few cases such as last year, a full-length time trial will be used.  Following the prologue, the Tour's general profile is: flat, mountain, flat, mountain, flat - with intermediate stages and time trials typically placed between flat stages and mountain stages.  Because the final stage of the Tour is non-competitive (by tradition) except for the final sprint, the penultimate stage tends to either be a time trial or mountaintop finish, so as to create tons of tension on that last day of real competition.

Back to the strategies.  In general, the flat stages will be battlegrounds for sprinters (green jersey), while the mountains will be where the GC contenders (yellow jersey) and climbers (polka-dot jersey) duke it out.  On the high mountains, most sprinters will struggle and merely aim to finish before the time limit (if you finish too far behind the stage winner, you are eliminated).  Similarly, yellow and polka-dot jersey contenders will play it safe on the flats and simply aim to conserve energy and not crash.  GC contenders will pick their spots to be aggressive, but since these spots are the same for all the GC contenders most of the time, this creates some exciting competition.  The polka-dot jersey competition is hardest to predict because of the large number of ways one can go about winning the jersey.  Contenders for the polka-dot jersey will pick what climbs to be aggressive on, but other contenders may have different ideas to the best path to victory.

While there are general trends we'll see as far as overall race strategy, explaining these strategies thoroughly is extremely difficult because the course changes every year, and the strategies to be employed depends highly on the nature of the course.  The fact that the course and strategies change every year is for me what makes the Tour so intriguing to follow.

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For now, I'll conclude this blog series.  The next post or two will be a preview of this year's course.  I'll make an analysis and comment on possible routes to victory for each of the three major jersey competitions.  Hopefully, the comments made then will be more helpful than the generalizations made in this post.