For three of the past four days, the Tour de France has largely been on hold, the race as good as on pause and the excitement dulled while the sprinters had their chances, and teams curiously decided against putting men in the breakaway.
Enter stage nine to reinvigorate the drama, the first-ever stage in the modern Tour de France with multiple sectors of chemins blancs – gravel roads. The 199km race in and around Troyes, passing over 14 sectors of loose rock, was won unexpectedly by TotalEnergies’s Frenchman Anthony Turgis, while behind the GC cohort tore shreds off each other, but ultimately all crossed the finish line as one.
It was like a 4-4 draw in football that has a flurry of goals at the beginning of the second half, but which somehow ends in a stalemate; no winners, no losers, but everyone exhausted and on their knees. This is the story of what the peloton agreed was the most difficult day so far.
The day's second sector after just 67km of racing was also its shortest. But coming at the foot of a category-four climb, it turned out to be one of the most pivotal moments of the race. A break of a dozen riders passed by without any major issue, until a complete peloton hit the gravel, and almost everyone was forced to climb off their bike and walk up the 10% gradients.
“It was slapstick comedy,” Lidl-Trek’s Tim Declercq said, finding the humour in the moment that he believes “ruined my race”.
“You try to keep going but you can’t, so you get off your bike, run for a bit, restart, but then another guy who is riding has more problems, gets off his bike, and then you’re forced to run again. In that part we didn’t look like a lot of pro cyclists.”
Declercq, a rider who has made his name in the spring Classics, added: “I didn’t do a recon of the stage, but looking on VeloViewer I thought it was comparable to the Classics, yet the middle part was much harder with a lot of climbing. I personally underestimated that section and the gravel was more loose than I expected.”
Bahrain-Victorious’s Jack Haig was also caught up in the melee of riders pushing their bikes up the off-road slope. “No one could get back on their bike any more,” the Australian said, "so we had to do a little bit of running past a few people. I was actually concerned about getting back on because it was quite steep and quite loose gravel.”
The dusty and chalk-splattered faces that re-entered Troyes after a spectacular day's racing were reminiscent of the faces that finish Strade Bianche and Paris-Roubaix.
For Israel-PremierTech’s Derek Gee, third on the day, “it was pretty surreal out there [and] the parcours was vicious,”; while Pavel Sivakov, one of Tadej Pogačar’s UAE-Team Emirates helpers, said it “was honestly maybe the hardest day so far… it was brutal, full gas from the gun, not a single moment of rest.”
Geraint Thomas, meanwhile, described the conditions underfoot as “deep gravel – it was hard to ride in a straight line.” His Ineos Grenadiers teammate Laurens De Plus summarised it as a “horrible day, it was stressful from kilometre zero.” The Belgian expanded: “People said the gravel wasn’t too bad, but then in the second sector everyone stepped off the bike, so actually the gravel was quite bad. A little crash on a very steep sector, everyone was off, and then it was all day chasing.”
Ever since ASO, the Tour’s organisers, announced the inclusion of the gravel stage, debate has raged about whether such terrain belonged in the Tour. Bahrain-Victorious's Pello Bilbao, sixth on GC last year but 16th at the moment, enthused: “I really enjoyed it, it was a special race, and I like to have some different days like one. I had fun and I hope that they make more stages like this.”
Despite the weary bodies, Bilbao believed that the parcours could have been even harder. “It was tough, but it looked like it was not tough enough because the group at the end was too big,” the Spaniard said. “We expected some more splits, but the last gravel sectors were flat and it was difficult to make the gaps.”
Michael Matthews, Jayco-AlUla’s bet for the day, concurred. “It was a great day, an open race,” the Australian said. “A lot of stages in this Tour we’ve been rolling around all day… we’ve been sitting in the peloton and it’s been a little bit boring, but a race like today gives the other guys a chance to do something. It was exciting racing and no one knew who would win all day. I don’t think many guys would say it, but I loved it. It was a real bike race.”
Opinion, though, was definitely split. Declercq’s Lidl-Trek are stage-hunting as opposed to trying to win the yellow jersey, but the experienced Belgian would prefer that such stages are kept out of Grand Tours. “It’s maybe a doubt to put this in a Grand Tour, even though it’s very nice to race on,” he said. “We now have so many GC contenders and it makes the race so nice, so imagine if two or three of them lost time because of bad luck and crashed. I’m not sure it’s worth having in a Grand Tour.” His compatriot, Brent Van Moer of Lotto-Dstny, agreed. “Imagine if Pogačar lost two minutes today, it’s then not about cycling anymore.”
The race’s youngest rider, Uno-X Mobility’s Johannes Kulset, hung his head over his handlebars at the end of the stage, dust clinging to the sweat beads dripping from him, hurriedly filling his mouth with Haribos. Just 20, he’s not had “much experience racing 70km/h on loose gravel wheel-to-wheel, but I think ASO and the Tour de France deserve a big shout out for a super-cool day that was insanely well done by them,” he said.
“It was super-smart of them to have this type of day on stage nine instead of the start because the peloton was more tired and everyone split from the start.”
It was perhaps the best spectacle of the race so far, but for Kulset and his fellow Norwegians especially, the day had an extra significance, coming just 24 hours after the death of 25-year-old André Drege at the Tour of Austria. “It was super emotional because we lost a guy yesterday who loved gravel, so I thought about him in every sector,” Kulset said, eloquent words that were the pitch-perfect answer to the question as to whether gravel belongs in the Tour de France. It might, it might not, but what cares is that every bike rider finished the race. “We couldn’t honour him how we wanted to, but it was super nice to go full gas for him today."
