At the old “Rendez-vous des gourmets”, near Millau, the hornets spoil everything and annoy everyone. The boss has tried the traps, the blue light that attracts them the better to grill them, the windows closed even in the middle of summer, he still has not succeeded in containing the treacherous attacks, inside and out. On the terrace, people having a drink suddenly remember that Armagnac contains sugar. Upstairs, guests are asked to enter their room with a bomb. Insecticidal gas erodes four months of life expectancy, but it suppresses that of hornets. At the beginning of September, the boss told us: “We must have a nest somewhere. This is how it is this year. Frankly, we don’t understand. ”
Swarm leader filled
In the Tour de France, it’s the same thing. Too hot a winter? Overripe pears that are good to eat on the tree? A reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field? Jumbo-Visma’s hornets, the black and yellow team, go wild. Yoann Offredo, professional runner and consultant for France Télévisions, soberly declares this Sunday: “They piss me off.” Beside him on the set, “the historian on duty” Franck Ferrand seems very shocked by this vocabulary. The chain launches its advertisement in disaster. The presenter takes the floor again by explaining that Egan Bernal is “human”. Because the outgoing winner of the Tour collapses in the fifteenth stage between Lyon (Rhône) and the Grand Colombier (Ain)? The Team Ineos climber is vulgarly left behind in the mountains, 13 kilometers from the finish, and we have to believe that only suffering makes “human”. But let’s give the real information behind this poor performance: it is still a hornet’s stroke. At that moment, there were five of them getting excited in a peloton of twenty terrified runners.
At the finish line, Slovenian Tadej Pogacar (Team UAE-Emirates) sprinted victorious. His compatriot Primoz Roglic (Jumbo-Visma) jealously defends his yellow jersey, a week before the final arrival in Paris, with 40 seconds ahead of the winner of the day. The swarm leader is happy: “You know, I don’t even have to tell my teammates to put on a steamroller beat. They go very fast, it’s in their nature. ” Thomas Voeckler, another former pro, demands live on France 2 that «la science» looks at the case of Wout Van Aert, a teammate of Primoz Roglic. It was this Belgian rider, hastily labeled a “sprinter”, who eliminated Bernal in the mountains. The language of commentators is barely coded. The special year of the Covid will not have changed anything, the Tour returns to its patterns: a team that rolls outrageously, its leader who rolls outrageously, the suspicion of doping that follows. One would forget that it is the history of the whole Tour which is written in a relationship without nuances dominant-dominated: before Jumbo there was Sky, US Postal, Renault, Molteni, the Italian team, and so many than to make Peugeot cycles at the beginning of the XXe century. Each time, the peloton, a fringe of lovers and followers are sorry. As much about this supremacy as the lack of obvious explanation at first glance.
Hidden in the bushes
As if they suspected something, for fear of a dirty spectacle, brutal, degrading for human dignity, the organizers had chased sensitive souls on the course. Entry prohibited for minors. The three passes were closed to spectators, even when the signs announced them open. The prefect of Ain, a department classified as red in the progression of the pandemic, had decreed a “closed door” in the mountains. Better than leaving from Nice. The national police therefore evacuated the camper vans who had settled in up to a week in advance. Zero quidam at the top of the Grand Colombier. A man holds up a sign in the plain: “We were robbed of the finish.”
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Ascent of the Selle de Fromentel and the Col de la Biche: naughty cyclophiles are hiding in the forest. A gendarme passes by on a motorcycle? They enter a bush. The caravan arrives with a cart in the shape of a giant melon? Hands protrude from the thickets to receive gifts. A clandestine remarks: “It’s silly to keep us from going up and piling up with thousands of people down there.” After the film on the nudist hunt in Saint-Tropez, the constabulary is really chasing the spectators of the Tour de France. Kilometer 146, in the village of Mieugy, two gendarmes want to intercept a man who is training by bike two hours before the runners pass. This is David Brailsford, the manager of Team Ineos. “Sorry, sir, you have to stop.” The bikers end up letting it circulate. Brailsford bredouille, in French: “I’ve never seen that.”
Pierre Carrey special envoy on the Tour route
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