The elimination race of this 2022 Tour started with a rainy time trial. A dangerous cocktail. The Tour prepares for months and can be lost in tenths of a second, which Alejandro Valverde needed in 2017, in Dusseldorf, to crash into a fence in a first stage very similar to yesterday’s, then over 14km and also through water . That same day, Ion Izagirre, then Bahrain’s leader, went home. And Valverde left the Tour in an ambulance. patella fracture
A Tour start time trial involves three hours of activity. Yesterday, from four to seven in the afternoon. The teams studied their strategy to the millimeter, calculated the possible gusts of wind and decided that it was better to place the leaders in the first hour, assuming that the conditions would be worse in the final part. Result: a downpour fell on them, and then, due to the need to mark terrain, caution was imposed.
The only thing missing as a general warning was that the Swiss Stefan Bissegger, one of the first specialists to take the start, slipped twice so that more than one understood that it was above all about not leaving by ambulance. Even so, with caution and risk calculation, the good guys are still the best. It is enough to review the classification of the stage.
Yesterday, in total, it was only 13.2km. There are three thousand pitches ahead of us, almost like going from Barcelona to Moscow by road, when we have barely reached Montgat. Why risk an accident, right?
