A VERY SLOVENIAN COUP
The warm glow of a mid-September evening in Paris illuminated the final actions of the 2020 Tour de France. In July, the sun sets behind the Arc du Triomphe, its last rays pointing straight through and south east down the Champs-Élysées, but this late in the year the sunset is due west. It cast an unusual light on an unusual Tour, with the podium backlit from a different angle.
Everything was a little different at this year’s Tour - the riders had started in Nice, raced 21 stages and reached Paris as planned, but the shadow of covid that loomed over the race and threatened to stop it in its tracks was given expression in the sharp light and long penumbra of the autumnal afternoons through which the peloton raced. It was familiar, but different.
The owl of Minerva, Hegel wrote, spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. Meaning, history can only be written at the end of the day. Only when we look back, after all is said and done, can we understand the meaning of what we have seen. All at the Tour could reflect in the Parisian gloaming that to be there at all was something of a miracle, but they could also reflect on a Tour which was decided in the most dramatic final day of GC racing since Greg LeMond won the 1989 Tour by eight seconds.
We thought we already knew the story of the 107th edition of the Tour. The shape of the race looked to be cast from a mould created by successive iterations of Team Ineos since 2012. Jumbo-Visma were the new Ineos; even
