Dane Jonas Vingegaard, winner of the 2022 Tour, in Bilbao (Spain), June 29, 2023. MARCO BERTORELLO / AFP
We imagined them stored in the recent past. However, masks, social distancing and another “race bubble” will still be part of the Tour de France, which starts on Saturday July 1 in Bilbao, in the Spanish Basque Country. Amaury sport organization (ASO), the managing company of the cycling event, has decided to keep a Covid-19 prevention protocol for this 2023 edition.
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This will result in particular in limited access for the members of each team to the finish line and the wearing of a mandatory mask in the paddocks. The riders and their staff must also limit their interactions outside of a “bubble”, in force around the competition. Forget meals outside the hotel, selfies and autographs, these will be prohibited.
For the fourth consecutive year, there will also be no handshakes on the ceremonial podium, although this time the riders will be exempt from facial protection. “We also don’t want a total contrast between everyday life and us”explained to Agence France-Presse, a few days before the start of the event, the director of the Tour, Christian Prudhomme.
Avoid the Giro scenario
On May 5, when raising its maximum alert level for Covid-19, the World Health Organization (WHO) insisted that the virus causing the disease had neither been eradicated. nor become harmless. SARS-CoV-2 “is here to last”, had hammered its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. For several months, however, the page of the pandemic seemed turned in Europe and in a large part of the world. But the health threat was remembered fondly by the peloton during the Tour of Italy, from May 6 to 28.
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The Jumbo-Visma team of Slovenian Primoz Roglic had to review its plans before the big start of the transalpine loop, with the cascading packages of several of its riders. Headliners like the “locals” Filippo Ganna (Ineos-Grenadiers) and Dominico Pozzovivo (Israel-Premier Tech) or the Russian Aleksandr Vlasov (BORA Hansgrohe) had left the event prematurely. Above all, the virus had got the better of the adventure of the Belgian Remco Evenepoel, big favorite of the Giro: the rider of the Soudal Quick-Step had to give up on the evening of the 9th stage after a positive test, he who had just recovered the overall leader’s pink jersey.
A situation that ASO wants to avoid at all costs. Nothing in the regulations of the International Cycling Union (UCI) today obliges the organizers to impose a protocol. In 2022, the weeks preceding the Tour de France had been marked by a sharp increase in contamination in France, as in all of Europe, favored by the contagiousness of the latest sub-variants of Omicron, a relaxation of barrier gestures and weakening of vaccine protection.
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