The Biggest Winners and Losers From the 2019 Tour de France

From Bicycling

On Sunday, Team INEOS’s Egan Bernal became the second-youngest rider in history—and first Colombian—to win the Tour de France. But the 22-year-old wasn’t the only one to have a fantastic Tour.

With the 2019 race in the books, we’re going to channel our inner-Burt Reynolds and play our own version of the popular late-80s game show Win, Lose, or Draw by doling out kudos to the riders and teams who stood out from the field and trying to figure out what kept some of the bigger names in the field from making a dent in 2019.

Winners

Colombia
After decades of trying, a Colombian has finally won the Tour de France, giving this long-starved cycling powerhouse its first victory in the world’s most prestigious bike race. Yes, it came in a Tour without Chris Froome and Tom Dumoulin, two prerace favorites who didn’t participate because of pre-Tour crashes, but that doesn’t matter in the history books. Picking up the baton from riders like Lucho Herrera, Nairo Quintana, and Rigoberto Uran, Bernal is now a national hero after claiming the yellow jersey. And at only 22-years-old, he looks capable of winning several more.

Julian Alaphilippe
In addition to Bernal, the 2019 Tour produced another national hero: Deceuninck-Quick Step’s Julian Alaphilippe. Even in defeat, Alaphilippe dominated this year’s Tour, animating the race from start to finish by winning two stages and wearing the yellow jersey for 14 stages before cracking on the second day in the Alps. His aggression, perseverance, and panache (in true French fashion) will never be forgotten. He’s probably the rider non-Colombians will remember most when they think of the 2019 Tour de France.

Dave Brailsford
He’s the man many people love to hate as the general manager of Team INEOS (formerly Team Sky), but in winning seven of the last eight Tours de France—with four different riders—Brailsford has pulled-off quite an amazing achievement. What’s especially impressive is the way that Brailsford has managed the competing ambitions of his riders during years in which the team came to the race with two contenders: Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome in 2012, Froome and Geraint Thomas in 2018, and Thomas and Bernal this year. But next year might be his toughest challenge: with Bernal, Froome, and Thomas all under contract for 2020, Brailsford will have hands full balancing the ambitions of his three Tour champions.

Jumbo-Visma
Jumbo-Visma had a fantastic Tour, winning four stages and putting Steven Kruijswijk on the final podium in third place. The Dutch team’s Tour got off to a fantastic start with Mike Teunissen winning Stage 1 and the team taking Stage 2’s TTT, which it won comfortably over Team INEOS. Dylan Groenewegen and Wout van Aert each won stages before the Tour’s first rest day, at which point the team’s attention switched to Kruijswijk’s GC ambitions. Here’s where the team really turned heads—with George Bennett and Laurens De Plus leading Kruijswijk through the mountains in a way we were used to seeing from Team INEOS. No other team put in a more well-rounded performance. And if their rumored signing of Tom Dumoulin comes true, we might be looking at the squad capable of de-throning INEOS in 2020.

Mitchelton-Scott
Good teams know when and how to alter their plans when things don’t go as they hoped. Take Mitchelton-Scott, for example. The team hoped to put Adam Yates on the podium in Paris, but those plans went up in smoke when the Briton lost two minutes during Stage 13’s ITT and another six on the Tourmalet the next day. So the Australian team shifted its goals, giving everyone the green light to hunt for stages. As a result, the team added three more stage wins to the account, starting when Daryl Impey won Stage 9. Simon Yates (Adam’s twin brother) won Stages 12 and 15, and Matteo Trentin won another in Gap on Stage 17. Four stages is a nice tally for any team, especially one that came to the Tour with different goals.

Lotto-Soudal
Belgium’s Lotto-Soudal also won four stages, headlined by Caleb Ewan’s three victories, including the final stage on the Champs-Élysées. Frustrated after being left-off Mitchelton-Scott’s Tour de France team last year, Ewan transferred to Lotto-Soudal in the offseason with the promise of headlining the team Tour roster. With more stage wins than any other rider in this year’s Tour, the Australian justified the team’s investment, and at only 25-years-old, looks to be the foundation of the team’s Tour plans for years to come. Besides Ewan, Thomas de Gendt won Stage 8 in dramatic fashion—the second Tour stage victory of his career—and Tim Wellens wore the polka dot jersey as the leader of the Tour’s King of the Mountains competition for 15 stages. During a Tour in which it would have been easy to be overshadowed by their Belgian rivals, Deceuninck-Quick Step, Lotto-Soudal more than held its own.

Peter Sagan
And of course, BORA-hansgrohe’s Peter Sagan quietly won his seventh green jersey in eight Tours raced, a new record. In all, the Slovak scored nine top-5 stage finishes, including his victory on Stage 5 in Colmar. At only 29 years old, he’ll still have many more chances to put his new record well out of the reach of any potential challengers.

Losers

Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome
You can imagine how Thomas and Froome felt while watching Bernal win the Tour—especially given how easy it’s been for the team to jettison the chances of a defending Tour champion in favor of the team’s hottest hand. For example, Bradley Wiggins won the Tour in 2012, but he wasn’t even selected to return and defend his title in 2013. Chris Froome won the Tour four times, yet he still found himself co-leading the team with Thomas in 2018. And Thomas, the 2018 Tour champ, shared team leadership with Bernal this year. Thomas and Froome will be 34 and 35 at the start of the next year’s Tour—well past the age in which most Tours are won. Will someone as savvy as Brailsford spend two roster spots on these aging stars in the 2020 Tour? That’s hard to believe.

Thibaut Pinot
For the second time in two years, the Frenchman went from the verge of grand tour podium finish to an early departure. But this year’s Tour is much worse. After winning Stage 14 atop the Tourmalet and finishing second one day later on the Prat d’Albis, Pinot looked like the strongest rider in the race and the man most likely to win France its first Tour de France since 1985. But then came his sudden abandonment at the beginning of Stage 19, an event that caught everyone except his teammates and staff completely by surprise. Pinot’s always been a fragile rider with a resume within which every highlight is balanced by an equally impressive collapse. After coming so close to glory, only to end the Tour weeping in his team car, we wonder the extent to which he’ll be able to recover.

UAE Team Emirates and Katusha-Alpecin
These teams have two of the largest budgets in the sport, so to come away without a stage win or high GC finish is quite a disappointment. UAE came to the Tour with Alexander Kristoff, Dan Martin, Fabio Aru, and Rui Costa, men who have collectively won nine stages throughout their careers, yet all four looked a step below what we’ve seen from them in the past. (To be fair, the Tour was Aru’s first grand tour since having surgery this spring.) Katusha came to the Tour weeks after an awkward split with sprinter Marcel Kittel and spent more time during the Tour answering questions about the team’s future than scoring high finishes. There are those who say Team INEOS has an unfair advantage due to the size of its budget. That may be true, but these two teams are proof that money isn’t (always) everything.

Richie Porte
Trek-Segafredo’s Richie Porte crashed out of the 2017 and 2018 Tours, making him one of the unluckiest GC contenders. Well, the good news is that he made it through this year’s event; the bad news is he wasn’t much of a contender. The 34-year-old finished 11th overall with only one top-10 stage finish. Porte will be 35 next year, well past his Tour-prime, meaning it’s time for him to consider shifting his focus away from three-week grand tours like the Tour de France and toward week-long stage races like Paris-Nice (a race he’s won in the past).

Team Cofidis
Egan Bernal was 11-years-old the last time Cofidis won a stage at the Tour de France. We’ll just leave it at that.

The King of the Mountains Competition
We don’t know how to fix it, but something needs to be done about the Tour’s King of the Mountains competition (in addition to banning those hideous polka dot bib shorts worn by Romain Bardet on the final stage). This year’s competition felt like more of an afterthought, with Tim Wellens spending 15 days in the polka dot jersey despite never contending for a stage win and getting dropped on all of the Tour’s major summits. Bardet, who spent much of the Tour off-the-back, took the jersey after one good day in the mountains (Stage 18), then barely defended it on Stages 19 and 20—he’s lucky both stages were shortened or he would have certainly lost the jersey to someone else. What can be done? Well, cutting down on the number of lesser categorized climbs and upping the points offered on higher passes and summit finishes is a good place to start. Here’s hoping the Tour can figure out a way to return this competition to its former glory.

We’ll Call it a Draw

Christian Prudhomme
After 18 stages, it looked as if Tour director Christian Prudhomme (and head course designer Thierry Gouvenou) had created a Tour for the ages, with a course that produced a French revelation, a tightly-packed group of GC contenders (including Pinot), and exciting stages almost every day.

But then came Stage 19, which started with Pinot quitting the Tour, followed by Alaphilippe losing the yellow jersey and then the awkward cancellation of the rest of the stage—just as the race looked ready to ignite. The next stage was shortened as well, effectively strangling the finale of one of the closest and most wide-open Tours we’ve seen in years. Prudhomme can’t be blamed for what happened: he had nothing to do with Pinot’s problems and certainly can’t change the weather. But he will forever rue the missed opportunity this Tour provided.

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