Thursday 17: 13:10–13:25 → 17:30–18:00
The first true mountain passes today.
The start is not as flat as often: they will use the hills of Gers instead of going along the valleys as the Tour de France always does. But just a bit: they will ride exclusively on the highway 🙄, so, long flat sections will still be present and the climbs will be smoother than on secondary roads; especially smooth as those hills are like factory roofs, and when going from East to West you always get the easy side.
Beside the top 2 favourites, we've witnessed today many unexpected weaknesses by climbers as soon as the slopes of the first pass began. Many of them somewhat recovered later, but still...
edit: wait, wait, wait: how did Raul Garcia Pierna (🇪🇸 Arkéa) manage to end up in 12^th^ position (before G.Martin🇫🇷, Jorgenson🇺🇸 and various climbers, in a bad day or not)? 👀 This seems to mean that basically only 10 riders from the peloton climbed better than him! On the Tour of Occitanie with a much weaker startlist, he was leading the GC before the first mountain stage but finished that stage after 80 riders and half an hour behind the winner... Perhaps there is a mistake in PCS classification?
They change drug testing recently?
After a bit of thinking, I reckon that it is more a case of having a grand maximum of 15 riders interested in GC and trying their best. So someone who isn't a strong rider but gives his best on a good day can relatively easily get in the top-20, sometimes top-15 when several GC riders are unwell and you had a little bit of advance thanks to a breakaway.
The same happened on the first Time Trial. There were like, what... only 20, 25 riders actually giving their best. Many openly declared it was a rest day for them...
It's starting to make me question what the point of a Grand Tour like the Tour of France is becoming, when we have a vast majority, perhaps up to 170 riders (!), which doesn't give a damn about making the best result.
It used to be that at least young riders / first-time participants would try to do their best at GC, but I am not sure that it is very common any more. Even the new guys seem to just do their semi-skilled worker task as assigned by the boss in order to get their big pay check, and no more (they might even get punished if they do more, in a few teams). When I hear more and more often from people who went to see the race on the roadside that "hey, it was cool to see XXX climbing this hard climb in wheelie, he looked fine" about riders who were dropped earlier in the race, I feel that the spirit of GTs has been turned into a joke. Until, say, 25 years ago (random number of years), the last riders really struggled, they certainly weren't going to do wheelies, they were dropped because they were weaker and exhausted. They we got the top-teams trains, with riders specialised into working hard for 20 mn and then relaxing until the finish line; and now it is general.
If it keeps deteriorating this way, some sort of a reform will become necessary. Starting with reducing delays. What does a GT mean, where is the endurance, where is the attrition, when a majority of riders only actively ride 40 km every 3^rd^ day and consider the rest as a... rest?