Well, up above it says "and the Tour de France in July" so: attention should be paid.
The Canadian cycling star Michael Woods, a track runner who turned to bike racing, is thirty-six this year, and lately so many dominant Grand Tour riders have been about 22 that there has been talk of abandoning the "Best Young Rider" designation altogether -- since they are already holding the major honours. It is good to see Woods accepted as the undisputed leader of the Israel Premier Tech team, with two very promising fellow Canadians, Hugo Houle and Guillaume Boivin, among his support riders. I wish Phil Liggett was still doing Tour commentary so he could transfer to Woods the epithet he used every time he mentioned Ryder Hesjedal: "the big Canadian boy."
But can a big thirty-six-year old going for the GC lead and the yellow jersey stand against youthful stick-insect climbers like Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogacar, Wout van Aert der Poul, and the slightly older Australian Jai Hindley? (I know, Tour riders have the best array of names in sport)
Five stages out so far, and Woods has been doing just fine. He's been sitting nicely in the top ten in the first four days, none of them prime days for hill-climbers like him, and has made no mistake and had no bad luck. Yesterday, beginning to get into the Pyrenees, he fell back a place or two, but so did Pogacar and other contenders. Today may show Woods's form on the big mountains -- they are going up the Tourmalet, incidently the scene of one of Ryder Hesjedal's best days ever.
Otherwise the Basque country that featured in the first three days looked beautiful, I did get tired of all the references to the Game of Thrones shooting locations that the peleton flowed past. The mid-altitudes of the Pyrenees are sometimes rather dark and forested, but the rural lower slopes and the treeless green heights make up for that. Soon they will be running through wine country toward the Central Massif.
