Romain Bardet will return to the Tour de France in 2023. Granted, he was there last year, and there in 2020, but you’d have to go back to 2019 for the last time his heart was truly in it. This year, he returns refreshed, focused, and wanting to “empty” himself on home roads.
But he also returns realistic. Runner-up in 2016 and again on the podium in 2017, Bardet was once the biggest threat to the Chris Froome era and the most likely successor to Bernard Hinault as the long-awaited home winner of the Tour.
Things have changed a lot in that time. Now 32 and nestled into the rhythms of Team DSM, Bardet says he’s better than ever. The problem is that the competition has evolved at an even greater rate.
“It’s been quite a shift. It’s going faster. The guys are stronger,” Bardet said during a press conference this week.
“Back in the day, when it was Team Sky, for sure they were super strong and I will not say that Sky in 2016 and 2017 were weaker than Jumbo-Visma today, but nowadays you not only have Jumbo, but also UAE and Ineos and so on. There’s much more density at the top.
“We also have super talents, like [Tadej] Pogačar, [Jonas] Vingegaard, [Remco] Evenepoel, who can make the race on their own. When [Bradley] Wiggins won the Tour, when Froome won the Tour, they really relied on their team to build their success, but now there are guys who can race around with some crazy attacks because they’re so strong.”
Bardet was keen to deny the idea that his form has not receded in any way since his Tour de France podiums. “It’s definitely better,” he said firmly.
It’s for that reason that his ambitions at the Tour have shifted. Top of his priority list is a stage win, which would be his first since 2017. After that, it’s about “doing the best GC result possible”, but knowing it’s difficult to pin a number on it.
What he wants, in a somewhat surprising and incongruously poetic comparison, is to do a “Tour de France à la Geraint Thomas“.
While Vingegaard and Pogačar knocked chunks out of each other last summer, sprinting away seemingly at will while others were already in the red, Thomas clung grimly to his own task and ended up ‘best of the rest’. The 2018 Tour winner became the subject of numerous internet memes but also of admiration from a fellow professional.
“I think his performance was brilliant,” Bardet said on Tuesday. “He was super fit, super lean, really focused on his own race, just giving his best every day. For a guy who already won the…
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