THE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO THE TOUR DE FRANCE | Explained

The Tour de France will begin on Saturday 26th June in Brest, France, and many of you guys may be tuning into the Tour for the first time. For this, we have created a brief introduction to the mechanics of the Tour de France.

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Credits
Ewan Wilson — Presenter

[ewanwilson]

I made this video so that French teachers can show this in class to introduce them to the race. if you’re a French teacher - please reply below 😁😁

[damianvavrik]

''Only Sagan can win without a team''. great vid!

[ebrown]

will be sharing this with my friends and family who generally tune out whenever i try explaining to them. thanks, ewan. best in the business.

[patrickfrigault]

Must watch before the netflix doc! Thanks

[brianharris]

Well done as usual. Sending to family and friends that wonder why I’m so obsessed with this unbelievable event each year. Bring on The Tour 🚴‍♂️💯

[cuebj]

Not a newbie to TdF, please excuse of too technical. Time Trials used to be decisive - perhaps more so than mountains - and could, still, be. Nowadays the time trial distances are usually much shorter than in the past due to televisual popularity of mountain stages. Anquetil, Indurain, Wiggins are three riders who won due to their time trialling ability. Team Time Trials can be decisive in being a test of team strength and, effectively, knock out great riders from weaker (low budget) teams.
Mountain stages could be classified into two types: high mountains, where thin air becomes a factor for some riders who are, otherwise, good in big mountains; and mountains that may have very long steep climbs but don't hit the highest altitudes.
Bike weight and the modern huge ranges of gears are a masive factor compared to the past. Some of us are old enough to remember chainrings of 53 by 42 at the front and 13 to 24 max at the back. Gear mechanisms simply could not cope with wider ranges. Innate cardiovascular capacities apart, if you were a sprinter or big time trialling diesel who wanted a low enough gear to get over a mountain, you had to trade that against spinning out, not keeping up, and wearing out your knees on the flat where your maximum gear was too low for the flats, let alone the downhills. Climbers needed the big gears to keep up on the flat but were light enough with long legs for levers to ride big gears in the mountains. Hence the rider type 'angel of the mountains'. Pantani perhaps the last great AoM (ignoring medication). Following a massive heart attack (genetic based - my core fitness put it off for 10 years), I have to monitor heart rate so very thankful for the gears I have now but gone are the days of bursting the heart and lungs up a 25% gradient in 42 * 28 before collapsing over the bars to freewheel down the other side!
I remember Contador tackling the Zoncolan in a compact SRAM chainset as being quite revolutionary - not to get over the hill or even to win the stage but to reduce strain on the musculoskeletal system and, therefore, recover much better for subsequent days of the race. It's the gears, perhaps more than the low weights that enable non-climbers to keep up in the mountains thus forcing the tour managers to search for ever steeper and higher hills and to reduce the time trialling to give pure climbers a chance of winning a stage, let alone the race. Of course, training and nutrition is almost infinitely more helpful that in the past - as evidenced by the impact Arsene Wenger had at Arsenal in the English Premier League. Electronic shifting systems help manage up to 26 gear options whereas, when we only had 2 at the front and 5 or 6 at the back, the downtube lever was all you needed, even flat out in a bunch or in traffic through Central London. In order to stretch the GC candidates in ever bigger and mroe frequent mountain stages, the old fashioned sprinter is being squeezed out - which I think is a shame.
I'm glad Cavendish is not in TdF - I'd hate to see his Epstein Barr return due to excess strain in high mountains and 21 consecutive days racing. If he maintains his return to form into next year, perhaps that extra year of health recovery would make TdF a fitting last hurrah. That relates to previous paragraph - the Grand Tours place much more emphasis on mountains than when he was in his pomp and represent a significant evolution in race design even in the career time of a single rider. Cav used to say that sprinters have it harder than climbers. Climbers can relax in the bunch on flatter stages though they may be more affected by cross-winds. They just did their stuff on four or five days when there were fewer mountain stages. Sprinters have to do their gut busting, muscle destroying high crash risk stuff on flat stages and then survive the time cut in terrain that they were simply not designed to perform in (like Usain Bolt keeping within Mo Farah's finishing time in a 10km track race). I remember one year the last finisher in TdF queen stage by someone who 'couldn't climb' was 2 hours faster than the first home rider in that year's Étape.
Modern frames are both very light and astonishingly strong and surprisingly comfortable. In the pick 2 out of three engineering options (cheaper being the third), the cost at least gives the manufacturers and shops a profit margin that keeps a roof over their heads and, maybe, some payments into a pension pot. Result is less battering fatigue on riders during the day. I suspect the trend towards extreme aero - high saddle, low bars, short top tube, long bar stem (like a TT bike) contributes to skittish handling and crashes. Look at Eddy Merckx - his saddle is barely higher than the top of his bars but the drop was deeper than modern bikes. OK, he had back trouble due to crowd control issues, but his contemporaries rode similar setups. On solo rides, I'd stay on the drops all day with my Cinelli 1A stem and deep drop bars.
Great site and videos. Thanks

[crazygaming]

Wow this was so helpful would recommend

[cuebj]

The Green Jersey has never been The Sprinter's Jersey. I think I read that, long ago, the Yellow Jersey was awarded based on points. For a few years, 1984 to 1989 (I just looked it up to check but 1984 is when we started watching TdF on Channel 4 in UK) there was a Red Jersey aka Catch Sprints or Hot-Spots Sprints, named, I think, after the sponsor. But the idea of an intermediate sprints competition may have pre-dated the jersey to spice up long dull flat stages - of which there were many. Around that time, there was also a mixed bag jersey that represented the rider who had best combination for all the jerseys - it rather took away from the Yellow Jersey's significance.

[yijuntey]

I know im late to this but please make one of these guides for more major tours or future tdf, this was very helpful

[mikepod]

1.) what they do with the ads for the jerseys? do riders keep their sponsors, or are each jersey sponsored individually 2.) can teams have yellow jerseys ?

[stephenware]

Great intro to the race. Could you please explain how riders get the same finish time, I've been told 3 different reasons, 1. If they finish within one bike length, 2. If it's one wheel length and 3. Within one second. Which one is correct or are they all wrong?.

[czeckson]

Hopefully a lot of Noobies get the chance of watching this very usefull explanation !