Tour de France Stage 1 - the perfect start?

Stage 1 Saturday 5 July Brest-Plumelec (Report and pictures)

I have the strangest feeling of being dragged back to childhood family holidays in Cornwall at the moment. In those days we stayed in an unused farmhouse which had a twisting, hilly, broken concrete road running up to the front door, water supplied by a well in the back yard and an overgrown orchard penned in with crumbling stone walls but bursting with feral apple trees. When you climbed to the top of one, as small boys do, the double blue horizon of sea and sky stretched out before you, it seemed to a 7 year old, forever.

Wind on 35 years and the same celtic salt tang on the breeze here in Brittany can still evoke the same and adrenalin pumping excitement at the opening stage of the 2008 Tour de France as those days climbing trees on the north Cornwall coast. Finding the car blocked by the weekly market that had sprung up in the quiet streets of St. Renan was amusing rather than annoying and did at least give me the opportunity to scan the papers at leisure whilst Sean Kelly, my commentating partner for the next three weeks extracted it much to the delight of the locals.

There is a wonderful homely feeling about the way this rugged, granite built Department has welcomed the Tour. The local paper dedicated six valuable pages to the Grand Depart from Brest, pouring in detail over the lives and careers of the 6 Bretons rolling away from the start that morning. Naturally there was inch upon inch of Robic, Bobet, Hinault and Lucien ‘Petit Breton’ but an equal space commanded by the woman from Auray who had discovered a hotel bill signed by Anquetil and the gentleman from St Malo who had painstakingly and lovingly built a model of the entire Tour entourage out of 1500 toy riders, cars buildings and the inevitable plastic cows.

They breed cyclists tough here in Brittany, so much so that their most famous son, Bernard Hinault, told me at the finish line that he had never even considered running his own team because he felt that his demands on a rider would probably kill them, to which there was a knowing nod from Sean, no ten stone weakling himself. In keeping with the rugged riders and terrain that the area is so famous for, yesterday’s stage did not disappoint. An inevitable break was reeled in with local boy Lilian Jegou and Spaniard David de la Fuente last to be caught in the swirling breeze.

The stiff uphill sprint for the line was won by pre-race favourite Alejandro Valverde, who’s lighting acceleration left the field struggling in his wake and gained him the yellow jersey. The question then is, why? As a favourite for the Tour surely he would have been better to just to hide his light under a bushel rather than streak off to victory and make he and his team marked from day one? The truth is that Valverde doesn’t know how to race any other way. His Director Sportif’s can be seen to pull their hair from their heads on a regular basis as their man takes off up the road again, but for the fan of course, it is the stuff that legends can be created from and I for one am not going to tell him to stop.

All looks set to be as open a Tour de France as many of us can remember with these opening few days marked by energetic breakaways as salty and zesty as the Breton wind that will batter them.

Surely, the perfect start to the greatest of all bicycle races?