This Friday afternoon, just after 4pm local time, the Tour de France will pass through a small town named Mélisey. It’s a typical French place, home to around 1,600 people, with old stone buildings, a post office and a couple of boulangeries. There’ll be bunting and fans decked in polka dots, as there always is. But there’s also something special about Mélisey.
On a farm within the commune’s hedgerows, one of France’s most beloved cycling sons wakes up each day at around 6am to tend to his animals. He feeds the sheep, goats and highland cows, and some nights has to head out in the early hours to help with births.
His lifestyle today is a far cry from three years ago when the Tour last visited the region. Then, riding in his final edition for Groupama-FDJ, Thibaut Pinot led solo over the Col du Petit Ballon, through a sea of thousands of fans. They waved flares and signs, and roared in the Frenchman’s face, carrying him through his farewell Tour on his home training roads.
Now retired and working as a farmer, Pinot will be among them at the roadside on stage 13. “That’s going to be a very strange and very beautiful feeling,” he said.
(Image credit: Airbnb/Anna Huix)
So what happened to Pinot after that final stage in the Vosges? He’s done few interviews since he left the sport at the end of 2023, preferring instead to retreat from public life into the bubble of his farm. This weekend, however, he has decided to open up his gates; in collaboration with Airbnb, he’s letting one family stay with him, free of charge, to experience the Tour passing through his hometown for the first time.
It will be, in his words, “a loop closing, in a way”.
“It’s a way to shine a light on the region and the town where I was born, where I grew up, where I always came back to between races, and where I chose to stay,” he said in quotes provided exclusively to Cycling Weekly.
“I was lucky enough to travel to beautiful places all over the world, but coming back here always had a different flavour, something I never found anywhere else.”
(Image credit: THOMAS SAMSON/AFP via Getty Images)
It was always Pinot’s plan to retire into anonymity. For years, he had been the darling of French cycling, adored as much for his victories – he claimed three stage wins at the Tour, including on Alpe d’Huez in 2015 and the Col du Tourmalet in 2019 – as his raw emotion, strained pain faces and teary post-race interviews.
Over 14 years as a pro cyclist, though, the attention from fans grew overwhelming at times. Now he’s enjoying the calm.
“The animals don’t know who you are or what you’ve won. That feels good,” he said.
“After so many years on the road, being able to go out in the morning and have this space around me, my land, my family, that means a lot to me. There’s also something deeply satisfying about work that produces something real, something concrete. Every day, you can see what you’ve done. That grounding in something real, I had been missing it.”
This isn’t to say, of course, that his new life is easy. Far from it. Pinot may no longer be training or racing, but with almost 300 animals to care for, he rarely downs tools before nine or 10 at night.
“It can sometimes be hard to anticipate what your day will look like,” he said. “You can do everything right, plan for everything, and then bad weather, a sick animal, a problem you didn’t see coming, and your whole plan changes. As a professional athlete, you spend years optimising every variable. Farming teaches you to let go.
“At first, I found that hard to accept. I came into this profession wanting to do things properly, and I was lucky to be surrounded by neighbours and friends here who were extraordinary and supported me at every stage of learning this trade.
“They didn’t treat me like a former cyclist playing at being a farmer; they passed on their knowledge, took me seriously, corrected me when I got things wrong. Without them, it would have been so much harder.”
It’s likely the Tour will pass through Mélisey today with little fanfare. The riders will hurtle into the town, through the stage’s only intermediate sprint, and on to the finish in Belfort. It may take five minutes for the whole cavalcade to pass, and calmness to resume.
But there, for those five minutes at least, Pinot will be part of the Tour circus again. For both him and fans alike, it will be a loop closing, in a way.
Cycling Weekly requested to speak directly with Thibaut Pinot but was told an interview would not be possible. The quotes in this article were provided exclusively by a PR representative for Airbnb.
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