The Tour!

Canadian Derek Gee (centre) third in a tightly contested climbing stage at the Tour

"and the Tour de France in July" it says above. I've been negligent about posting the Tour in its first two weeks, but I have been watching.

Two weeks in, it looks to be Tadej Pogačar's Tour all the way. He is only twenty-five but increasingly he is being counted among the great cyclists of all time. He is strong with or without his team around him. He goes into sprints when the spirit moves him.  His tactical sense never deserts him. It seems he can do anything on a bike. But mostly he can go up hills -- the big, endless, steep ones -- faster than anyone.

Jonas Vingegaard of Denmark, last year's Tour winner who was cruelly injured in a crash earlier this season and somehow made it back to the Tour, is the only rider who has been able to offer any kind of a challenge despite whatever lingers from his injuries, but it has not been enough. Pogačar is making it look easy (it is not!).

Pog's seemingly inevitable victory robs the Tour of some tension this year. But France (and northern Italy, where they started this year) still look beautiful every day, and there have been some stories. 

• There's actually a Covid scandal no one seems to address. Several riders have tried to ride with Covid and ended up half way through a stage gasping their lungs out far behind the peleton and finally withdrawing. Past winner Geraint Thomas tested positive a week ago and continues to race -- the Typhoid Mary of the 2024 Tour, with the tolerance of the officials -- and several other significant riders have had to quit.
• Mark Cavendish, the great sprinter of the early 2000s, somehow came back to win another stage at age 39 and seized the all-time record for Tour stage wins. That was fun. Cavendish in his prime used to be kind of an obnoxious badboy, but he seems to have mellowed, and his all-time record was very popular.
• Because of the Olympics in Paris, this year's Tour will not end with those amazing circuits around the Champs d'Elysées. The finish will be in Nice instead.

And we have a new Canadian to watch. Michael Woods, a stage winner last year, skipped the Tour to focus on the Olympic Games races. And at 37, his Tour years must be winding down. 

But Derek Gee has suddenly emerged as a serious overall contender. He burst into prominence last year with unexpected results in the Giro d'Italia. This year he placed third in the weeklong Criterium du Dauphiné in the Alps. Expected to try for a stage win or two this year, he instead blossomed as a general-category contender. He's ninth overall at the moment, and a top-ten finish in the Tour de France is no small achievement. Pretty articulate in interviews too (Ryder Hesjedal and Mike Woods tended to aw-shucks Canadian offhandedness).  And he's only twenty-six.