ON THE EDGE

During the campaign for the 2007 French presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing candidate for the incumbent Union pour un Mouvement Populaire party, is reported to have said, “Je m’en fous des Bretons” (I couldn’t give a sh*t about the Bretons), which might explain why his opponent, Ségolène Royal, carried three of the region’s four départements.

It’s easy to imagine that almost all of the GC favourites for the 2021 Tour de France might have expressed similar or even stronger sentiments, if not about the people of Brittany, then about the region, its roads and the all-pervading sense of chaos that permeated the opening four days of the race. The 2021 grand départ was marketed as a homecoming for cycling to one of its heartlands, and after the eerie and discombobulating crowdless atmosphere of the 2020 Tour, was just what