In Moirans-en-Montagne on Friday morning, there was the familiar crowd holding vigil outside the Groupama-FDJ bus. Jonas Vinegaard (Jumbo-Visma) might have the yellow jersey of this Tour de France, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) may continue to vie for the title of G.O.A.T., but Thibaut Pinot commands an adulation that goes far beyond the vagaries of form or the strictures of the results sheet.
Adherents of the Collectif Ultras Pinot, his self-styled fan club, have made regular, performative displays of their devotion across this, his final Tour appearance, but it was a slightly less boisterous demographic that awaited the Frenchman in the sleepy village of Moirans-en-Montagne before stage 19. Their acclaim was more restrained, but no less heartfelt for it.
When Pinot emerged from the bus and reached for his bike, he was greeted with a ripple of warm applause. A young man called Hugo was brandishing a cardboard sign bearing the hopeful legend, ‘Thibaut, please sign my bike’, and the clapping grew louder still when Pinot was alerted to the request and walked over to fulfil it.
“Bravo Thibaut, bravo,” one elderly woman cried out, cheering the act of courtesy with a sudden fervour that put one in mind of Marc Madiot’s exhortations when Pinot scored his maiden Tour stage win at Porrentruy in 2012.
“He’s different to the other big riders. He’s very humble and he shows his emotions,” said Hugo, who smiled after Pinot had scribbled his name on his top tube.
During his years on the Tour, Pinot has grown used to being public property, even if one senses he has never truly felt comfortable with the acclaim. On the eve of the 2019 race, for instance, this essentially private man was asked if he really even wanted to win the Tour at all, given all the attention that such a success would inevitably entail.
“It’s not an obsession,” Pinot admitted to L’Équipe back then. “I like my life as it is at the moment. It’s the life I dreamt of and if I win the Tour de France, I won’t have this life anymore. Do I want to change my life? No.”
It would prove to be the quintessential Pinot Tour. For almost three weeks, he looked increasingly like the best rider in the race as he moved to the brink of becoming France’s first Tour winner since Bernard Hinault in 1985. Then, two days from Paris, he suddenly and surprisingly abandoned with a torn thigh muscle, climbing tearfully into a Groupama-FDJ team car.
It was, in hindsight, the moment his window to win the Tour definitively slammed shut, but the cruelty of his ordeal and the rawness of his reaction seemed only to heighten his appeal. Winning the Tour might have reduced Pinot to a name on a roll of honour, a mere statistic. Losing it in such a brutal way only burnished the legend still further.
Sporting fandom is ultimately about powerful emotions, and no rider of this generation provided them in as visceral a way as Pinot. Plenty of his peers in the peloton are admired, but none are as beloved as Pinot.
“It’s because he’s not cheating people,” Groupama-FDJ directeur sportif Philippe Mauduit told Cyclingnews on Friday. “When he needs to cry, he cries. When he’s happy, he shows that he’s happy. When something is not right, he says it’s not right. When something is beautiful, he says it’s beautiful.
"He’s just a normal person, and I think a lot of people see themselves in him. That’s why he’s so popular.”
Vosges
In January, Pinot announced that this would be the final season as a rider, but even though he will continue to race until Il Lombardia in October, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that Saturday’s penultimate stage of the Tour marks the spiritual ending of his professional career.
The 133.5km leg brings the race through Pinot’s beloved Vosges en route to Le Markstein, with his name sure to be daubed all over each of the six classified climbs. In his native Mélisey, a big screen has been installed for the occasion in the local sports complex. It seems all but inevitable that Pinot, currently 12th overall, will be aboard the early break, though it’s less clear if his legs will carry him to a valedictory stage win on home roads.
“For sure, a lot of riders will look at Thibaut and it will probably be really difficult for him to be in the breakaway, but that’s part of cycling. We know the game and what can we do?” Mauduit said. “He has to go for it, even if brings 20 riders with him. They will all look at him until the finish line, but that’s part of the game.”
On Wednesday, Pinot was in the early break on the final Alpine stage, though he had to settle for 11th place in Courchevel after the move broke up on the mighty Col de la Loze. No matter, he sounded a defiantly optimistic note afterwards about this weekend’s grand finale.
“I'm thinking more along the lines of ‘see you in three days’. On Saturday, the stage is on roads I know by heart, so there's still a lot of motivation,” Pinot said. “There are a lot of emotions, I'm thinking about a lot of things. I think I've come full circle.”
Mauduit maintained that Pinot has been racing with an altogether more relaxed mindset in this, his final season as a professional. Indeed, that much seemed clear at the Giro d’Italia, his favourite race, where his constant aggression saw him claim fifth overall in Rome and the maglia azzurra of best climber.
“He’s a completely different rider this year,” Mauduit said. “It’s all about enjoying what he’s doing, it’s all about freedom and enjoying his last year. He wants to achieve it in the right way and that’s what he is doing, actually. Now, he just deserves to have that big victory before he quits cycling…”
Mauduit joined the Groupama-FDJ staff ahead of the 2019 season partly at Pinot’s behest, having previously worked at Saxo Bank, Lampre and UAE Team Emirates. In that first campaign, and in the injury-blighted seasons that followed, he saw a rider who occasionally made himself a prisoner of his own expectations.
“Thibaut was not a kind of rider who felt the pressure coming from outside. The pressure was coming always from deep inside him – he was eager to do well, eager to perform, eager to do always better,” Mauduit said. “He was putting all that pressure on himself, and sometimes he had some big injuries and illnesses. This year, he was never sick, just because he rides with a free mind, you know. C’est la vie.
“He’s not a rider who was ever difficult to work with. The most difficult thing with him was to try to make him accept to just let it go. OK, you want to perform, OK, you want to be the best, but don’t put that much pressure on yourself. That was the most difficult job for us.”
Then again, Pinot’s paradoxes were always part of the appeal. His extravagant, uninhibited style on the bike was accompanied by a guarded shyness off it.
“I hate talking about myself,” he admitted to ITV’s Daniel Friebe earlier this week. It’s telling, too, that one of the peloton’s quiet men has still been among the most outspoken on doping, voicing concerns that lamentably few of his peers dared to raise.
The pressure Pinot put on himself to try to win the Tour, meanwhile, always seems to have coexisted with the nagging thought that maybe it wasn’t really what he wanted at all.
If anything, the adulation for Pinot is so intense precisely because he didn’t win the Tour, and not in spite of it. To paraphrase Roddy Doyle, claiming yellow in Paris would have been predictable; missing out in the way he did was poetry.
Mauduit, for his part, saw little point in ruminating on what might have been in 2019. The bike rider didn’t win the race, but the man endured. Whatever the final outcome, Saturday’s last waltz in the Vosges will be an occasion.
“You can’t change the past. It’s how it is, simply,” Mauduit said. “I think we just have to be thankful to life for giving us these emotions. We are just living in the present at the moment. What are we doing? Where are we? With you? It’s just fantastic to be with him at the moment in the team. He brings so much, and way more than in the last 15 years, because he’s a man now. He’s not just a kid riding his bike and trying to perform.”
