Opinion: Annemiek van Vleuten was the right winner of the first Tour de France of a new generation

Five days ago Annemiek van Vleuten was in trouble. A lot of trouble. Plagued by a stomach bug that meant she “couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink,” the Giro Donne champion was on the brink of abandoning the first women’s Tour de France in 33 years She didn’t.

Ad/> Nor, despite her discomfort, did she lose a meaningful amount of time. The only reason, going into the mountains, she had a handful of seconds to make up on the few riders she might have considered rivals was because she finished in the second (slash third) group on Stage 2. Tour de France FemmesBreaking unwritten rules wouldn’t have stopped Van Vleuten, jokes BlytheAN HOUR AGO Then, on the following day, she again lost less than she should have, considering she had barely ingested a calorie that she had been able to keep down.

The likes of SD Worx and Canyon Sram may be left wondering if they should have done more to break her, to take advantage of her. All’s fair in love and bike racing. There will be those — plenty — who will have wished they had.

It’s okay if you were among them. It would have been perfectly in bounds, not broken any “unwritten rules,” if they had put her to the sword. Maybe they should have.

Perhaps it would have mattered little if they had. The point of Grand Tours is not just that you are the strongest rider, the one most capable of enduring the physical loads necessary to sustain a long assault across a range of terrains, but that you are the luckiest. You have to be lucky to never be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a rider in front of you touches the wheel of a rider in front of them.