If you ever find yourself sitting around a dinner table with a group of Italian professional riders, whatever you do, make sure you pass the salt correctly when asked for it.
“It’s an Italian thing,” Jayco-Alula’s Luke Durbridge tells Cycling Weekly in Saint- Jean-de-Maurienne before stage five of this year’s Tour de France. The bizarre culinary superstition is, he says, important in any team where there is an Italian influence. “You can’t pass the salt to any of the Italian riders at dinner, you have to put it [down] on the table,” Durbridge continues. “So you pick up the salt, lean over, and put it on the table next to the person. If you pass it hand to hand it’s really bad luck, and they get very upset if you get it wrong.”