Riders on Le Tour climbing out of Bologna

I’ve grown to really love watching the Tour de France (aka Le Tour) cycle race. I have been to watch it twice in central France and it has taken me many years to understand some of the complexity and subtlety of this three week race. Because the Olympics are being held in Paris this year, where Le Tour normally finishes, the race will end in Nice in the south of France. But today’s second stage was raced in northeastern Italy, from Cesanatico on the Adriatic coast to Bologna.

I was intrigued to watch the race today on tv which I managed intermittently as one of my earliest memories of holidays in the sun is of camping near Cesanatico with my parents in 1960, the year the Olympics were held in Rome. We spent nearly two months travelling around Italy after my father left the army after twenty years. One of his reasons was to return to where he’d been injured fighting in the 2nd World War. It was a wonderful trip for a ten year old at a time when tourism hardly existed. It was the start of my love of hot climates and holidays on various Mediterranean coasts.

My Blip today is obviously of a tv image. It shows the moment that one of the two main contenders laid down the gauntlet about twelve kilometres from the finish of the stage in Bologna. The race required the riders to ascend a very steep hill, the San Luca climb, twice, from the middle of Bologna, following a road lined by an amazing colonnade which is 1.9km long and bridges 199 vertical meters with an average gradient of 10.5%. The screen indicates the slope here is 11% and rising to 16% within two hundred kilometres, when I took the picture in the 'Extras'.  Tadej Pogacar is in the white shirt and helmet, in the middle of the three front riders! Jonas Vingegaard is the rider in blue on the left at the front.

Here Tadej Pogacar, who recently won the famous Giro d’Italia this year, suddenly accelerated just as the steepest part of the climb began, hoping to break away form the other main contender, Jonas Vingegaard. Jonas has only just recovered from a massive bike crash less than three months ago where he suffered a collapsed lung and broken ribs and a fractured collarbone in the Tour of the Basque Country.

Neither of these two riders won this stage, but Pogacar did go on to claim the celebrated yellow jersey indicating the leader of the overall race. However what stood out today was that he couldn't shake off Vingegaard who followed him to the end of the race. He has won Le Tour for the last two years. So the challenge has been laid down on only the second of twenty-one stages. I shall be watching closely, whenever I can, almost certainly enthralled.