Dhe diary of Jonas Rutsch from the Tour de France is regularly updated here. His reports are recorded by Alex Westhoff.
Tag 1: After the team presentation, I lay in the hotel bed in the evening and thought: Jonas, you didn’t do that badly. The amount of work behind it has paid off. So now it’s coming true, my first Tour de France. Right now I feel a mixture of curiosity, respect and anticipation for the next three weeks. On Wednesday I traveled by train from Wiesbaden, where I live, to Brest, where the Grand Départ of this year’s tour is taking place.
Eight and a half hours by train – I don’t mind because I can put my legs up, clear my head and sleep a lot. Since I found out after the Tour de Suisse that my team, EF Education-Nippo, had nominated me for the Tour of France, a lot of care has been taken. It’s my first three-week tour in my second year as a professional.
The tension is really still within limits for me. That may be due to the fact that I feel 100 percent well prepared – with the good results it couldn’t have gone better recently. Well, the fact that I broke my rib in a fall at the Tour de Suisse is stupid. But I actually only notice that when I have to go deep, i.e. from around 160 heart rate while breathing. But that won’t stop me from offering 150 percent of my capabilities every day to do what the team asks me to do.
Sure, a lot of new and unexpected things will come crashing down on me. In the first few hours I noticed that everything here on the tour is bigger and faster, more intense and more extreme than in any other bike race. They all seem to have only one approach: All in. The experienced tour participants I speak to advise me to enjoy it and soak it all up.
Tag 3: My biggest insight from the first days of the tour is: You don’t get anything here, but really nothing for free. Every position in the field has to be fought for and defended with full commitment. The following really applies: kick or die. From the classics, I was already familiar with the fact that the field is stuck, that there is no more getting through. But on the tours that I have taken so far, there were always gaps that you could scurry through. Not so with the tour. The others want to roll over you from left and right and push you backwards, so you have to counter it with a lot of horsepower. On Sunday I still managed to position my guys from the team at the front – and then drove 15 kilometers at the front of the peloton.
Watching the Tour de France on TV got me into cycling as a kid. That’s why I really wanted to compete in my first bike race in a yellow jersey. But I didn’t think of that at the moment when I led the field. It was just about doing my job.
The first stage on Saturday was the most hectic bike race I have ever participated in. You could feel the pressure on the drivers and teams. And then there were two cruel crashes in the mass falls. With the first, the one caused by the spectator, I was one of the few people in the field who got around the battlefield. On the second, just before the finish line, I was luckier than I was. I kind of stayed on one leg on the bike and got through the slaughter. Those were shocking scenes.
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