Some of the best-looking jerseys you’ll see this year in the Tour de France won’t be those worn by classification leaders, or even just plain old team members – they’ll be on the backs of the peloton’s new national champions.
The weekend just gone saw road championships held across the northern hemisphere, with the national tunics being swapped between riders in most cases.
Not all of those riders will make the Tour de France selection for their teams of course, but plenty will, and we could see nearly a dozen national champions taking the start line in Barcelona on Saturday.
It’s always a great honour for a rider to be able to wear their national champion’s colours at a race like the Tour and they’ll show them off with pride. Whether some of the team sponsors will be quite so pleased is debatable, with the champion’s tops generally watering down the sponsorship somewhat.
Among the new road champions who have already been confirmed as riding in Le Grand Boucle are new Tadej Pogačar‘s Mexican teammate at UAE Team Emirates-XRG Isaac Del Toro, new French champ Romain Grégoire (Groupama-FDJ United), Germany’s Felix Engelhardt (Jayco-AlUla), George Bennett of New Zealand (NSN Cycling), Denmark’s Magnus Cort (Uno-X Mobility) and his Norwegian teammate Anders Skaarseth and finally new Kazakh champion Nicolas Vinokourov (XDS-Astana).
These seven are the riders that have been confirmed, but there are likely to be others, not least new British champion Fred Wright (Pinarello–Q36.5) and Quinn Simmons of the USA (Lidl-Trek). Simmons’s teammate and new Czech champ Mathias Vacek could be there too, and Egan Bernal, who won the Colombian champs back in February, remains a possible for Netcompany-Ineos.
The new road champions aren’t the only riders who will be sporting national champs’ jerseys over the coming three weeks – there are also the time trial champions, who get to wear their own national colours during the Tour’s two races against the clock: the stage one team time trial in Barcelona, and stage 16’s lumpy ITT on the shores of Lac Leman.
So far those riders are set to include Italian TT don Filippo Ganna (Netcompany-Ineos), Spain’s Pablo Castrillo (Movistar), Germany’s Nils Politt and Austria’s Felix Großschartner at UAE Team Emirates-XRG, making it three national champs helping out race favourite Pogačar, and there’s also Netcompany-Ineos’s Polish stalwart Michał Kwiatkowski and Eric Kirsch of Luxembourg and Cofidis.
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