Tour de France 2020: Stage 6. A beautiful Cévennes mountain scorned by boring pros

 Not angry, just disappointed.

The TdF went up a col that was a fave for me and my old SudVelo cycling club in Montpellier - Col de la Lusette in the southern Cévennes. There’s a few things I miss about France and the Languedoc/Roussillon/Herault regions now I live in Berlin - the food obviously although Berlin food isn't bad and much better value; the good cheap wine; the handy vicinity to both the Alps and the Pyrenees, to Spain; the quirky southern French folk and their love of slapstick, sexual innuendo and fart jokes; the awesome weather; a barely legal basement diveclub called Association Tropical Club that had a gigantic musty mattress strapped to its door in a vain attempt to keep the thumping regaeton and weedy fug in...

I could go on but one of the things I miss the most is the awesome cycling country around Montpellier and in particular les Cévennes, a remarkable national park located about 50km north of Montpellier, beginning I believe in the town of Ganges. 

A little bit raw and wild but very beautiful with its gorges and sweeping plains and roaming animals like boar and deer and white rabbit; canyons make it a rock climbing mecca, bouldering and caving and canoeing too. Its rolling hills and forests and trails make it a fave with campers and hikers and Robert Louis Stephenson described a lot of this in his 1879 book, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, although Stevo’s 12-day donkey trek was mostly further north - from la Monestir to St Jean du Gard. Probably shouldn’t have mentioned it then, but I wanted to sound worldly so hey, it stays in.

Anyway, if you ever get the chance, go to the Cévennes, the people are mostly friendly and full of French character and everyone seems to be growing or rearing something that ends up in something delish like a rustique tapenade or a jam or terrine or whatever. The roadsides are a smorgasbord of little stalls full of the stuff. Nickel chrome,  as they say in these parts (awesome).

It's not you Lusette, it's them...

Et donc…la Lusette. As a cyclist it reminds me more of a Pyrenean climb than say an Alps climb – a little bit less civilised but all the more interesting for that; the macadam a bit rough, potholed, gravelly and broken up in parts and the gradient quite erratic, swinging between say 6-12% as it winds up the mountain, in parts exposed to what can be a ferocious Mistral wind, in others densely forested.

The TdF roadbook had it down as 11.7km at 7.3% and category 1 which isn’t far off HC, especially when you consider the preceding category 3 col de Mourezes was 6.1km at 4.8% with only a very short 3km light descent between and then the strangely uncategorised 5km 3-4% climb to Mt Aigoual to finish the stage. (By comparison L’Alpe d’Huez is 13.8km at 8.1%.)

Point is, it’s a tough climb in anyone’s book - for riders in the Montpellier area it’s pretty much the toughest local climb going. The doyen. It’s the kind of climb that should provoke attacks and refined selections in a GC group. No doubt that’s what the TdF route planners had in mind by bucking convention and sticking such a tough col in the first week of racing. Chapeau to them for that. But the attacks never came. The main peloton just tempoed it up and more than 30 riders hung in the GC group while the break stayed away. That tells you everything you need to know. 

Afterwards the explanations came about keeping powders dry and rough roads and blah blah, whatever, it just sucked that a beautiful col, our Lusette, that was making her TdF debut didn’t become the site of something epic from the pros. Such a shame.

So yeah, not angry, just disappointed.

Hope you’re not smarting Lusette. You’re so much better than this.

SudVelo coureurs Alexandre et Gabriel: Toujours animé sur ou hors du vélo; toujours heureux d'être sur la Lusette

*Here's a few pics of the day from Rouleur magazine.