What is about fourth overall in the Tour de France? For the last 10 years, only two of the riders who have finished one step off the podium - Alejandro Valverde and Primož Roglič - have managed to improve on their result in any of the following Tours.
David Gaudu (Groupama-FDJ), having finished just behind Geraint Thomas and off the Tour podium last summer, is currently suffering from the ‘curse of fourth’ and is lying eighth overall right now. The Frenchman remained adamant that it is still possible to come back into the game.
Gaudu suffered badly on the Puy de Dôme, finishing 25th and losing over a minute for the coveted third place in Paris to rivals of the calibre of Tom Pidcock (Ineos Grenadiers), 1:06 to Carlos Rodriguez (Ineos Grenadiers), and 52 seconds to Jai Hindley (Bora-Hansgrohe). That’s a very different story to the 2022 Tour when after nine, admittedly much easier, stages, he was only 21 seconds off the podium and lying fifth overall.
But despite lying 3:21 behind Hindley and having avoided talking to the media after Sunday evening’s defeat, in a press conference on Monday’s rest day Gaudu insisted that he still remained in the podium game.
“It wasn’t the result I expected yesterday,” Gaudu said. “Despite that, I had felt really strong during the stage and I could count on a great team. So I was very disappointed.
“So the good feelings were there in the first week, even if the results weren’t what we expected, unfortunately. But we’ve decided to go for the GC, and we’ll continue to hold on and hope for a better second half.”
Gaudu argued that even if the first week of the Tour is always fraught, for him initial part of the race had gone very well, pointing out that he - as well as teammate Thibaut Pinot - were in the front group when things fell apart on stage 1. And the race had not gone badly in the Pyrenees, either. However, it was precisely when he was feeling at his strongest, on the Puy de Dôme, that things had fallen apart.
“My feelings of disappointment are that much higher as a result,” he said, “so that’s why we’re going to focus so much more now on the second part of the race.”
Asked directly if he was going to change his tactics regarding the GC, Gaudu denied that would be the case. Rather he said, the idea would be to change his team’s strategy to push their rivals harder.
“Our objectives when we came in were very ambitious, we wanted to do better than last year, and by default that means getting on the podium or getting the highest result possible.
“Just one week has gone by, we’ve lost some time, but the general classification of the Tour de France is something for which we have a great deal of respect. So I’ll take it on day by day and as a team, we’ll try to be more offensive in the second part of the race.”
Gaudu’s teammate Pinot, currently lying 15th overall, but an invaluable source of support for Gaudu even in his last Tour de France, provided some historical perspective on Gaudu’s situation, arguing in L’Équipe newspaper that “ever since I’ve turned pro in 2010, there has never been such massive gaps in the first week [of a Grand Tour].
“I think the podium is still possible. And if a podium is not possible, then that’s by no means ridiculous. In a Tour de France which is being raced as hard as this one, you can’t be critical of finishing fifth or sixth. We’re just going to say we’ll finish as high up as we can.”
Quite apart from the Puy de Dôme being a tough day for Groupama-FDJ, Pinot also said that he and other riders had discussed the ban on roadside spectators in the final kilometres for environmental reasons, and although he understood the reasoning, there was a definitive negative side to it all.
“A lot of us riders talked about the lack of public on the final part of the route, and we thought that was a pity, it took us back to the COVID years,” he said, when fans were also banned from the sidelines.
“So it took us back to some bad memories, even if the place was magnificent. There are logical reasons why they did that, and which I understand, but for us, the public is what makes the Tour.”
Looking for a mountain stage win himself, Pinot added, “as we’ve often had repeated to us, there’s still a long way to go. We’re only on day nine of the race, we haven’t done any massive mountain stages yet. The stages we’ve done have been relatively flat early on then hard at the end, which stops you from doing much other than follow wheels. But from the second week onwards, we’ll have the chance to do something different."
“If you look at the route book like a meal, you can see we’ve eaten the entrée but we haven’t got onto the main courses yet and still less the dessert,” added Manager Marc Madiot. “A lot of things can still happen.”
