Intermarché-Wanty are a small, Belgium-based cycling team. They’ve been coming to the Tour de France since 2017 and up to this year they had never won a stage, let alone have a challenger for the Yellow Jersey. This year that has changed. This little Cinderella team have come to the ball and claimed two stage wins in the first week. And they have made their Tour breakthrough with their black African sprinter, the excellent Biniam Girmay.
We mention Girmay’s race because before last week, no black African had won a stage of the Tour. Girmay comes from Eritrea, where cycling is hugely popular, and anyone checking the results will discover that Eritrea is the Real Madrid of African cycling. Though far from a big budget team, Intermarché-Wanty are an admirable outfit. Fans who gather at their team bus are greeted, not ignored, and the team make of what they’ve got while remembering cycling is also sport, not just business.
At last year’s Tour of Flanders, Girmay was involved in a horrible high-speed crash. One minute he’s travelling at 75km/hour, the next second he’s on the ground with riders falling on top of him. He hit his head and lost consciousness. Two hours passed before he came round. “When I was in the hospital, somebody from the team came to visit me every day in Belgium,” Girmay said last year. “I was there for two weeks after the crash, and whoever came to see me stayed with me for like two hours.
“I cannot say enough about my team. At the beginning of the year, they said to me clearly that they didn’t expect me to repeat last year. And they stressed that I have a four-year contract and that I still have time to develop.”
Good luck to Intermarché-Wanty for reminding us that sometimes good things come to the team that do the right thing. Girmay followed up his stage-three sprint victory in Turin on Monday by winning into Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. Turin is a city with 4.3 million, Colombey-les-Deux-Églises is a village of 800 people but the Tour had its reasons for finishing in Colombey.
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It was here that Charles de Gaulle had his country residence, La Boisserie. Whenever Paris life got too much, General de Gaulle escaped to Colombey. Local people saw him walking the grounds with his daughter Anne, who had Down’s syndrome. Those from the village talk about the penultimate leg of the 1960 Tour, from Besançon to Troyes. It was a Saturday and on their way to Troyes they passed through Colombey.
That weekend De Gaulle was at La Boisserie and, like the rest of the villagers, he secured his place by the side of the road to see the Tour pass. No suit, no tie, no entourage, just another Frenchman paying homage to a national institution. Even at this pre-mobile phone time, word got round and back to the Tour organiser, Jacques Goddet, that De Gaulle was standing on the roadside in Colombey.
In Chaumont, 20km before Colombey, Goddet got the message to the patrons in the peloton that the race would stop in Colombey and pay its respects to De Gaulle. Luckily there were no breakaways and stopping the race for a minute or two wasn’t a problem. Standing up in his open room car, Goddet used his megaphone to greet De Gaulle.
“The Tour sends its affectionate greetings to President De Gaulle.”
Clearly embarrassed, De Gaulle seemed uncertain about what to do and so he was drawn to the rider in the Yellow Jersey, Gastone Nencini.
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“You are going to win the Tour,” which, of course, Nencini did.
So, to win in Colombey was no minor victory. It was the first time for the village to host a stage finish and goodness knows it might never happen again. Girmay is 24, which is youngish for a sprinter, and is riding the Tour for the second time. Last year he was overwhelmed by the speed and physicality of the sprint finishes but he’s learnt fast. He beat Jasper Philipsen because he stayed calm on the slight uphill pull to the line. Philipsen went, he waited and then picked off his rival in the last 50 metres.
As Intermarché had their second win, Ineos Grenadiers will be hoping to have their first in Sunday’s 199km loop around Troyes. Their hope will be that Tom Pidcock will be suited by the 14 gravel sections. Pidcock is the Olympic champion in mountain-biking and is a former winner of the one-day Strade Bianche, which has long gravel tracts. In an interview with the Cyclingnews website last week, Ineos’s performance director, Scott Drawer, outlined how the team plan to develop. “Our owners are hell-bent on developing our own talent,” he said. “We’re not going to buy the top guys in, we’re going to develop our own. That’s more exciting for coaches. That’s more exciting for riders. If we’re going to win Grand Tours again, our investment and work has to be on young talent. I think we’ve been caught between what we once were and where we want to try to get to.”
The difficulty for Drawer and those now running the team is the recent past. Team Sky/Ineos won the Tour de France in seven out of eight years, 2012 to 2019. That is the standard but the team haven’t competed for the Yellow Jersey in any of the last four Tours. Their general classification rider in this Tour, Carlos Rodriguez, is good but not at the level of Tadej Pogacar, Remco Evenepoel and Jonas Vingegaard. Fourth or fifth would be an excellent result for Rodriguez.
Now committed to not buying in the top riders, the team are going to have to wait before they win their eighth Tour de France. And it could be a long wait.
Stage eight
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Semur-en-Auxois to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, 183.4km
Leading positions
1 B Girmay (Erit, Intermarch-Wanty) 4:04:50; 2 J Philipsen (Bel, Alpecin-Deceuninck); 3 A De Lie (Bel, Lotto-Dstny); 4 P Ackermann (Ger, Israel-Premier Tech); 5 M van den Berg (Neth, EF Education); 6 R Gibbons (SA, Lidl-Trek); 8 F Wright (GB, Bahrain Victorious) all same time.
Overall
1 T Pogacar (Slove, UAE Team Emirates) 31:21:13; 2 R Evenepoel (Bel, Soudal-Quick-Step) at 33sec; 3 J Vingegaard (Den, Visma-Lease a Bike) 1:15; 4 P Roglic (Slove, Red Bull-BORA) 1:36; 5 J Ayuso (Sp, UAE Team Emirates) 2:16; 6 J Almeida (Por, UAE Team Emirates) 2:17; 7 C Rodríguez (Sp, INEOS Grenadiers) 2:31; 11 A Yates (GB, UAE Team Emirates) 4:56.
