The Danish Ending

As ‘Le Grand Depart’ came to a conclusion on Sunday, Wout Van Aert’s frustration at a third consecutive second place was palpable. Though Van Aert’s ultimate quest for the green jersey will be helped by a lack of sprint stages such as these, neither the upcoming terrain nor his current ownership of the yellow jersey will yet console him. If he was feeling inaccurately self-deprecating, Wout could consider himself a Jack of all Trades against masters. But Fabio Jakobsen’s competitive spirit in the high mountains will be channelled into surviving time limits - his personal and sporting rival Dylan Groenewegen will only hope his toils at the Dauphiné weeks ago will spare him the worst of such stresses. Only Peter Sagan seems to pose a serious threat to the Belgian, and even that will rely on him besting the man who last year won stages on Mont Ventoux, the Arc de Triomphe, and the humble stopwatch. Van Aert is a man capable of consoling himself.

Reliant on extrapolating conclusions from handfuls of seconds between riders after just 13km of treachery through the sodden streets of Copenhagen, the battle for who will wear yellow in front of the Arc can barely be considered. Instead, as cycling often does, we can focus on the nuances and subplots of the sport that make it unique to any other.

There was a moment, early in Stage Three, that the motorbike camera focused in on lone breakaway Magnus Cort’s face. The road reflected from his sunglasses into our minds, transporting his thoughts and ideas to us. At once, the hopelessness of his endeavour was clear, a never-ending road to nowhere lay ahead in the horizon. His machine-like efforts sat in pursuit of points in a classification he will never win, over climbs which could barely be considered a mound. It all seemed at odds with a sport eternally trying to rationalise itself despite the ever-present influence of emotion.

Yet through his sunglasses – far away from the distant peloton (in that moment conveniently spearheaded by a coalition of rival Danish domestiques) – it was precisely this emotion which drove Cort forward. It surrounded him, emboldened him, made an otherwise stoic man sit-up and smile. In the hypnotizingly empty road ahead lay a passionate ambience rarely seen when the Tour is racing in its’ motherland. In the periphery of Cort’s vision (and indeed ours) lay the hopes and joys of the Danish population at large, gathered en masse to celebrate the immense sporting spectacle that decades ago acted as the catalyst towards making ‘Copenhagen’ both a noun and adjective in cycling infrastructure discourse.

In this moment, the double irony of a punchy sprinter leading the mountain’s classification through one of Europe’s flattest countries could be otherwise happily resigned to an anecdote, retold only in the sporting biographies of the future. That day, Cort represented not only himself (revelling in the undivided spotlight of leading the Tour de France through his home), or his team (usually content to celebrate their achievements through a less mainstream lens) but also the joy and passion this happiest nation in the world has for the simplest pleasure of cycling.

Unlike the road’s appearance in that snapshot, there would be an ending to Cort’s grand day out with the Danish people. The stage’s ending some fifty kilometres later served to reignite and redraw the existing discourse that surrounds so much of bike racing to its relatively small clique of fans and followers beyond the sporting mainstream. Lead-outs, ‘punchiness’, and the resurgence of a once condemned sprinter to deprive the yellow jersey of a victory he frankly deserved. 

But stage-racing doesn’t exist for these mere results and successes. Yesterday provided 130km of joy and story-telling that can never be articulated in a palmarès. It was a day for the cycling universe to rejoice and celebrate our mutual sporting love, to forget about the wretched data that drives forward each pedal stroke. Today typified, as well as any other, why cycling is the greatest narrative sport in the world - and the Tour de France is the emotive thriller you can’t put down.