Jonas Vingegaard had been carrying the Tour de France chief’s well-known yellow jersey for nearly every week when the query got here.
It wasn’t a matter of race technique, maintaining tempo or one of the simplest ways to maintain his nerve and his lead by extra days of twisty roads, tight turns and punishing climbs. It wasn’t a query of health or kind.
Would he be extra snug, Vingegaard was requested, if he had been in second place?
“It will be simpler, sure,” he replied. “Definitely.”
For all of the credit score and respect it earns, for all it means in a sport obsessive about knowledge and element, the sacred yellow jersey has a stunning variety of inconveniences and downsides.
For instance, groups can use a wind tunnel for hours to good each element of a rider’s positioning, bike and clothes. The reward, if the rider does effectively sufficient to get into the lead? A brand new jersey from the race’s official sponsor, Santini, which can not match or carry out the identical manner.
“It’s kind of completely different,” mentioned Tadej Pogacar, two-time Tour winner and a daily wearer of the yellow jersey. “You are not used to it.”
Then there are the obligations. After crossing the end line on every day’s stage, the race chief is guided by a dizzying array of duties. He’s being interviewed by the Tour. He’s being interviewed by the race’s official broadcast companions. He indicators a number of jersey facsimiles. He climbs the rostrum, together with a couple of different riders (a bunch that features the stage winner and the leaders of a number of different classifications) for a presentation and images.
Then he has to struggle his manner by a crowd of journalists and a video press convention. The final cease, and presumably the longest, is on the doping management. He’s there till nature calls. “I might be on the lodge an hour earlier daily,” mentioned Vingegaard, if solely he weren’t within the yellow jersey.
Nonetheless, it’s the highest honor for another rider to put on it for even a day, a second within the first line of the obituary. “My thoughts explodes,” Yves Lampaert mentioned with tears in his eyes final yr, after a shock victory within the opening time trial of the race. “I’m only a farmer’s son from Belgium.”
The mystique of the maillot jaune, because the jersey is understood in French, is so universally understood that it’s not even essential to specify the colour when referring to it. It is simply, The Jersey. And at an occasion the place the colour yellow is inescapable – fluttering flags, clinging to sweaty spectators and chosen for the lanyards hanging across the necks of journalists, organizers, VIPs and even law enforcement officials – it is really much less frequent within the race itself. There, the signature hue, Pantone Yellow 1000, is supposed to be seen in just one place: on the race chief’s again. (Race leaders have been recognized to experience a yellow bike or put on different yellow gear as effectively.)
“The fries are prepared!” shouts a voice as an pressing beeping interrupts the bustle across the trailers and vehicles scattered outdoors the Moulins press heart after stage 11. Fabrice Pierrot chuckles and releases the press in entrance of him. After sliding a small block of wooden into the mechanism to carry it open, he gingerly pulls off a yellow jersey with the still-steaming brand of Vingegaard’s staff, Jumbo-Visma.
Pierrot is the Tour’s jersey printer, who has to provide particular jerseys daily for the rostrum, but additionally for the subsequent day’s race. Backstage on the rostrum, Pierrot takes notes on the riders, although after 20 years on the job he can normally decide them by sight. “This technology, like Pogacar, by no means uttered a phrase,” he mentioned. “I take pleasure in working with them.” On this present day, by the point Vingegaard finishes, nearly precisely an hour after he crossed the road, his staff bus and each different staff’s bus is lengthy gone. Boundaries are damaged down and the stage is folded again right into a trailer. He’s as he has been for days: wearing yellow and happy with it.
“It does not match very effectively, nevertheless it suits wonderful,” Vingegaard mentioned, a faint smile creeping onto his usually stoic face. “I might reasonably be in The Jersey than my regular jersey.”
