At the Tour de France the wind invents the stage that wasn't there: Jasper Philipsen wins

The organizers had thought it through well. The first stage of the 2025 Tour de France was the perfect bait, a sugarplum to sweeten the mouths of the sprinters . Flat and flat to ride and then off to the great representation of speed. On the other hand, the sprinters deserved it, they had been neglected for years. It was since 2020 that one of them had worn the yellow jersey due to a lack of opportunities on the first stage. The last one had been Alexander Kristoff in Nice in that strange summer in which it was hoped that the pandemic was about to go away bent by the summer.

And so in Lille it was supposed to be their day : the fastest would take the victory and the yellow jersey, a day of contentment, good for not thinking about the few chances they would have during the three weeks of racing. A bit sneaky, those in the Tour.

In Lille the first to cross the finish line was Jasper Philipsen ahead of Biniam Girmay and Søren Wærenskjold. Three sprinters in the first three places, everything as planned. Five years after Kristoff the Tour de France finds a sprinter in the yellow jersey: wasn't this how a stage with just one climb and a lot of flat land and not even a thousand meters of altitude difference was supposed to end?

Numbers and altimetry never deceive. They always tell the truth, above all they are immediately understandable. You can't try to imagine with numbers and altimetry. Luckily, riders are bodies that move in space and space is crossed by air, and the air becomes wind and the wind, unlike numbers and altimetry, can be interpreted and above all it is always an excellent support for cycling mischief. Because the wind, when you pedal, is the place of imagination, it is capable of creating things that do not exist, making mirages real, allowing inventiveness to find a home .

And July is the month of wind in Lille. It has been known since the early 1800s. Even the geographer Pascal-François-Joseph Gossellin had written a little pamphlet about it. How rascal those of the Tour de France, perhaps they had read the little book, which was partly a study of the winds, partly a declaration of love for Lille. And perhaps those of Visma | Lease a bike and those of Alpecin-Deceunick had read it too. At the right moment Jonas Vingegaard and his companions and Mathieu van der Poel and his companions chased their mirage, they got ahead, they accelerated just right, they trusted in the wind and the wind managed to create from nothing in the countryside of that piece of France that smells of Flanders, wonderful and very hard climbs. The group broke up , with Primoz Roglic and Remco Evenepoel, Felix Gall and Florian Lipowitz, Lennert Van Eetvelt and Carlos Rodríguez and quite a few sprinters struggling behind. The disaster was over (the gap at the finish was 39 seconds, it could have been worse). Of course, those from Visma | Lease a bike would have hoped that Tadej Pogacar would also remain behind, but the Slovenian champion is not used to falling into these traps.

If it hadn't been for the wind and the teams of Jonas Vingegaard and Mathieu van der Poel, the day in Lille would have been like one of the old Tour de France, a long wandering through the countryside at a sleepy pace, the chance to close your eyes for a nap and the wonderful relaxation of your heart at a minimum due to the lack of emotional stimuli.

It went like this for 160 kilometers (much less for Filippo Ganna: he fell and retired after just a few kilometers), then in the last twenty the script fell apart because the musicians crumpled up the score and started doing their own thing. Improvisation began to reign. And when it's like this, it always ends up that someone from Alpecin-Deceunick, often Mathieu van der Poel but not always Mathieu van der Poel, finds himself first under the finish banner.

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