TOULOUSE, France — They were going to make it. After working with three riders all day, staving off the pursuit of five others, and eventually holding off the determined charge of a former world champion, Uno-X’s Jonas Abrahamsen and Jayco’s Mauro Schmid rode into Toulouse together to contest Stage 11 of the Tour de France. One of them was going to earn their first career Tour de France stage win. The other would leave with nothing. All I knew as I saw the pair wind up for the sprint was: I was going to talk to the loser.
Breakaways succeed only rarely and only for reasons that are legible in retrospect. You need to be a strong rider to win from a breakaway, but more than that you need to be a good gambler, which is code for: blessed by divine providence. Moves off the front of a race only succeed when the strongest teams decide against expending the energy necessary to chase them down or, in quite rare cases, do some gambling of their own and leave the chasing too late. Chasing everything down is usually worth the best teams’ while, so many breaks are by their nature doomed. That makes the ones that work extra precious.
But nobody rides to be a mere part of a winning move. They ride to win. That makes losing from a winning breakaway one of the most painful ways to lose a bike race, a fantastic structural victory housing a soul-ravaging defeat. Schmid and Abrahamsen worked together well into the final kilometer, pursued as they were by Mathieu van der Poel. Abrahamsen found himself in second wheel into the final corner, which meant that Schmid was forced to make the poisoned choice between allowing Abrahamsen to get the jump on him, or opening up his sprint first and towing Abrahamsen to the line. Abrahamsen went first. Schmid was ready. Abrahamsen beat him by millimeters.
(A fan protesting the inclusion of Israel–Premier Tech in the race leapt out as the sprint unfurled; more on this later in the race.)
After the finish, Abrahamsen rode into a thicket of screaming Uno-X staffers. Van der Poel rode up to him and congratulated him on the win. I ran past the exchange to the Jayco bus, where a hollowed-out Schmid was sitting on the bottom step with a recovery drink and a thousand-yard stare. A sports director, a soigneur—in cycling, a multi-purpose support person—and Jayco’s press officer flanked him, forming a thin semicircle that could not keep the small group of assembled journalists from seeing how gutted Schmid was.
Schmid jumped from kilometer zero along with Abrahamsen, and he was out all day. Salt lined his Swiss champions jersey, and apart from looking devastated, he also looked exhausted, the two feelings scarcely distinguishable from each other. After several minutes of recovering from the ground, he got onto his trainer and answered our questions.
“I think maybe I launched like a second or two too early,” Schmid said. “Gear was maybe a bit too big, and then I lost.” The word of the day was: disappointment. Schmid was asked if he was less disappointed having only lost the stage by centimeters, to which he replied, “Yeah, I was close. But I think in the end, it doesn’t really matter by by how much.” In other words: No.
I asked Jayco sports director Pieter Weening, who won a stage at the 2005 Tour from a breakaway, whether second place was still something to be proud of. “It is a big result, but, yeah, it’s disappointing,” he said. “You know, if you finish so close, you know it’s right there. For now, it’s disappointing. It’s a disappointing thing, but what he did today was incredible.” In other words: No, not right now anyway.
Schmid knew he was probably not going to get another opportunity at this year’s Tour, as the bulk of the remaining stages are forebodingly mountainous. Given how scant opportunities are, specialists often identify and train for specific breakaway stages. Schmid is one of those riders. The biggest win of his career came at the Giro d’Italia, from a breakaway, in a two-up sprint.
I asked him whether Stage 11 had been in his sights for a long time. “No, I’ve just recovered quite well on the rest day,” Schmid said. “I had a good look at the next couple of stages and realized that there are not so many opportunities for a bigger guy like me. So then I thought, yeah, obviously I will give it a crack today.” Weening agreed. “Today was actually a perfect, perfect stage for him,” he said.
It was also a perfect stage for Abrahamsen. A throng of Norwegian fans waved flags and chanted next to the Uno-X bus. When the team car rolled up to the bus, sports director Stig Kristiansen stuck his head into the car and howled. Every Uno-X rider who rolled up was jubilant; Stian Edvardsen-Fredheim said they got the call on the radios while the peloton was finishing and he had to keep himself from openly celebrating while the race was still going. Uno-X had never won a stage at a Grand Tour before. This was the feeling denied to Schmid.
I spoke with Kristiansen after the stage, and he said he knew it would be a breakaway day months ago. He distinguished it from what he called “insane breakaways,” which are those doomed ones we mentioned earlier. This was a real move.
Abrahamsen went from the jump, though his move was never guaranteed to work. He had to risk exploding his own legs to make the move stick. He also had to decide, along with Schmid, whether to continue working hard together knowing that van der Poel was among an extremely strong group of five behind them. “We told him he should just continue working, because there will be guys coming up to them, but maybe only two guys came up to them, and the other didn’t manage to catch them,” Kristiansen said. “So we said, Force it, force it, because that will be tired guys coming up to you. It’s the best chance we have. We tried to anticipate when the group in front with van der Poel would get there, so we could go before they came and make suffering even more.”
Everyone suffered, but only Abrahamsen won. Those are the stakes. After talking to the Uno-X guys, I was lurking by the Jayco bus near Jayco rider Luke Plapp and a friend, when their conversation was interrupted by some loud screaming. It was the Norwegian fans.
