Sleeping like babies and working like horses
Knock knock. On Monday, several members of the Bahrain Victorious team opened their doors to find police ready to search their homes, five days before the beginning of the Tour de France in Copenhagen.
The searches targeted both riders and staff members in multiple countries, and were connected to an investigation by French authorities that involved a hotel raid of the same professional cycling team during the 2021 Tour.
This cycling team, by the way, is primarily sponsored by the government of Bahrain, a prime reminder of cycling’s nonchalance on the subject of human rights.
Knock knock. Same team, second hotel raid. This time in Copenhagen, just over 24 hours before the beginning of the Tour. No Bahrain Victorious personnel have been accused of a crime.
Midweek, Vladimir Miholjević, a prominent team staff member, told a member of the cycling press corps, “We’re sleeping like babies and working like horses. We’re showing everything through our results and we are 100 percent transparent.”
Sleeping like babies and working like horses.
Maybe the pressure was getting to Miholjević, a Croatian. Maybe the non-native English speaker simply slipped up, combining two idioms that are completely fine on their own, but utterly jarring when combined.
The incident is emblematic of what makes the Tour so compelling. The three week race through France is a collection of stories, some harkening back in time, some illustrating what a modern sport is, many doing both at the same time.
Hopefully Bahrain’s riders slept like babies, as they would be working like horses for the next three weeks, beginning with the Stage 1 time trial.
If cycling is a juxtaposition of stories, each one contributing to a sense of chaos, then mother nature is an important protagonist. The rain came earlier than expected, soaking the hopes of pre race favorites like time trial specialist Filippo Ganna. In another cycling WTF moment, Geraint Thomas forgot to take off his rain vest—”gilet” as the Europeans call it—before leaving the start hut.
Yves Lampart set the fastest time of the day, saving an otherwise disastrous season for his Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl team. "I'm just a farmer's son from Belgium,” the emotional 31-year-old said, invoking one of cycling's favorite stories, that it’s an everyman’s sport. Anybody can make it if you try hard enough.
The next day, mother nature disappointed and delighted again. The sport’s pundit class could not stop talking about the “Big Bridge,” an 18-kilometer-long bridge crossing the Great Belt Strait near the end of the flat stage into Nyborg.
Certainly there would be crosswinds and the race would blow apart into echelons, they said. The winds were not as fierce as predicted and many were disappointed by the Big Bridge.
Fabio Jakobsen won the sprint to the line, a key moment for the rider who nearly died after a crash at the 2020 Tour of Poland. Dylan Groenewegen is blamed by many, including Jakobsen, for causing that crash. As theatrics would have it, Groenewegen won the third and final stage in Denmark, crossing his story with Jakobsen’s once again.
The Tour is the perfect stage for storytelling. Three weeks, three acts. Some riders’ stories will end far earlier than others, and they will all stretch on far beyond this year. We will all watch in awe, mesmerized by the athleticism, feel good stories, and emotion, but sometimes cringing at the crashes, brutality, and anti-doping chatter.
There’s nothing like living a story in real time.