The Grand Tour Files 2020: pro cycling tales from a social distance

The Grand Tour Files 2020: click here to buy in paperback or kindle e-book.

On one hand we had a crisis. Nothing less than a public health emergency. On the other, several dozen skinny blokes racing bikes to win a colourful t-shirt.

If you were tasked with designing an event to propagate a virus further and wider across a continent it might well look like a Grand Tour. A thousand-strong caravan of riders, staff, journalists, liggers, and hangers-on moving from town to town, in and out of every hotel from Sicily, via Paris, to Madrid.

A spectacle to which people traditionally gather at the roadside, get as close as possible to each other, and bellow, open-mouthed, saliva-spraying with excitement.

Eek.

The Grand Tour Files 2020 tells the story of a lunatic year. Weird and unprecedented stuff was happening left and right. The sensible course of action was to sit back and let it be.

The Grand Tour wins of Tadej Pogacar (Tour de France) and Tao Geoghegan-Hart (Giro d’Italia) raised some serious eyebrow. Primoz Roglic, at the Vuelta, less so. But the season was chock full of other highlights:

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Peter Sagan winning Stage 10 of the Giro solo, for example, by simply pedalling faster and harder than everyone else. The appearance of a rainbow on the finishing straight to frame Sagan’s wry, understated ‘remember me?’ celebration. He reminded us that he’s one of the greatest of all the humans and how could we ever have doubted him?

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Or what about Lancashire lad Hugh Carthy scaling the horrifying twenty-percent gradients of the Alto d’l’Angliru at the Vuelta Espana? Dropping the leaders on the final tortuous ramp, nailing the final kilometre to seal the biggest won of his pro career, and looking totally baffled as to what all the fuss was about.

GLORIOUS!

The Grand Tour Files 2020 tells all these tales and more, of a season the like of which we (dear god…let’s hope) will never see again. From a suitable social distance, of course.