A LONG WAY TRAVELLED
When he picks up the phone, Romain Bardet is almost home from home. Covid-19 has narrowed all of our horizons and the Ag2r La Mondiale team is no different. A dozen of the riders - the Tour pre-selection - are on a training camp in Chambonsur-Lignon, an old Huguenot enclave in the Haute-Loire, which is the next département over from Bardet’s home in Clermont-Ferrand. In the pre-covid days, teams would think nothing of flying four or five hours south to Tenerife for training camps. Now, they’re a couple of hours’ drive on the autoroute.
Maybe Chambon has been deliberately chosen to remind Bardet and the team of happier times. Their base is the same hotel as they stayed in on the second rest day of the 2017 Tour, when Bardet lay in third overall just 0:23 behind Chris Froome following a stage to Le Puy-en-Velay, in which Ag2r had come close to distancing the Brit and his Sky team with an ambush on the Col de Peyra Taillade. Froome had never looked so vulnerable; Bardet had never looked so confident and so strong.
Bardet is talking quite a good fight now, as well. The legs, “ça va”, but
