Old rules no longer apply as new breed of all-rounders embrace ‘crazy’ Tour

Fifteen years have passed since the new Tour de France organiser, Christian Prudhomme, announced his intention of “sexing up” the race – my words not his – after watching a dramatic stage across Burgundy. Since then the Tour has gone in one direction: shorter stages, more hilltop finishes, the odd gravel road, cobbles, a search for routes where crosswinds may affect the peloton, fewer and shorter time trials; a search for ways to create tension and excitement, to avoid the race becoming predictable.

The 2022 Tour looks like the culmination of that process. Barring accidents or illness – not an idle statement in a Tour where Covid-19 has played a lead role – Jonas Vingegaard will ride up the Champs-Élysées on Sunday having won the fastest ever Tour, one which has seen only two conventional bunch sprints as of Saturday.

Once the race left Denmark on the opening Monday, the scenarios became less and less probable, reaching a climax on Thursday when Vingegaard and Tadej Pogacar traded a last set of attacks, up hill and down dale, through the Pyrenees.

The extreme speed and total lack of respite means this has also been a crazily hard Tour even by the outlandish standards of cycling’s great marathon; no team was physically capable of controlling Friday’s stage finish, and the peloton was split into tiny groups on what, in less extreme days, would have been a routine bunch finish.

Such crazy times call for the right actors, and it’s clear that the old-style Team Sky/Ineos routine of cycling as catenaccio has been left far behind in the wake of Vingegaard and defending champion Pogacar, who has finally run up against a rival he can measure himself against, and – as when all greats meet their nemesis – he will emerge larger in