France feels stretched out sometimes. The entire country appears to just go on forever. Even in these days of immediate connection, you can feel the France that Annie Ernaux wrote about in The Years: “The gateway to the exotic was the nearest big town, the rest of the world unreal.”
Nowhere is this more true than the Corrèze, through which stage nine of the Tour de France marched on Sunday, one of the least populated départments in France, a keystone in the diagonale du vide, the empty corridor that strikes through the country. It’s a region that most would only know about because of the Tour, even the French.
The race is a perfect showcase for the area, just as the land is inextricably linked with the race. It helps that the Corrèze is also on the edge of the Massif Central, and so the perfect terrain for a thrilling stage of the Tour, even in a red weather warning. It was escape territory, with endless short, sharp hills which were the perfect launchpad for attacks, and so it proved.
Mathieu van der Poel triumphed from the breakaway in Ussel, with fans and the four teams represented in the breakaway relieved that it was still possible for escapees to hold off the peloton, that tactics could still outfox sheer power. Tobias Halland Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility) was second, ahead of Tom Pidcock (Pinarello Q36.5) and Alex Baudin (EF Education-EasyPost).
“It turned out to be the complete chaos stage we thought it was going to be,” Uno-X sports director Stig Kristiansen said post-stage.
“It was a quick start, because there was a sprint after 14km with the shortened stage. It was so warm that people would either have to go a little bit slower, or it was going to be fire because the rest day is tomorrow, and there are two more or less easy days behind them, and the peloton opted for the chaos. It never stopped.”
Despite the chaos, it did not always seem like the break would make it. The men up the road were never given much leeway. UAE Team Emirates-XRG, who crushed the hope of a similar move on stage three, seemed intent on doing the same again.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
“It was the first time I thought it could work and I really thought I could win,” fourth-placed Baudin said. “Today, for a moment, I thought we were going to get caught again, so it was a little hard in the head. But yes, I’m really happy that it went well. On stages like this, it’s made for the breakaway.
“If the GC teams start to control these stages, we don’t watch TV anymore. At what price? Where do we have to go? We had to fight all day long. I don’t know who was driving and how he was driving behind us, but it never let up.”
It was a relief, then, that the break wasn’t caught, and those who had put in their all could fight it out for the win, even if it wasn’t Baudin or Halland Johannessen.
“When you go in a die-hard breakaway, there are always big quality riders,” Kristiansen said. “It’s always going to be difficult to win. If you end up on a mountain, it’ll be [Isaac] del Toro or [Juan] Ayuso, and if you end up in a sprint like this with Mathieu or Wout van Aert, it’s close to impossible. Tobias did a really good sprint, but Mathieu van der Poel is super-quick. [It was] good that he is number two.”
In the stretched out France, the Tour needs breaks to be able to survive in order to show off the landscape, to fill up this empty region with excitement. The Tour still visits the exotic, like the Corrèze is to many, and the unreal is still there.
