Diary: Paris

Paris for the final stage of the Tour de France, street wandering and atmosphere.

Sunday morning before Mass at Notre Dame

Map-checking at the Père Lachaise Cemetery

I had compiled a Père Lachaise list: painters, poets, musicians, politicians and the odd surrealist. We had a map - trouble is, Père Lachaise is dense with graves and without signposts. Probably there's a GPS app but I skipped the research. We found nothing but enjoyed the walk.

Neither Clare nor myself found any of our targets

The Pyramide du Louvre from the Tuileries Garden

 Sainte-Chapelle

Our hotel was the 123 Sébastopol - at 123, Boulevard de Sébastopol 75002 Paris. A smart hotel pioneering early gentrification of a shabby neighbourhood, ethnically mixed between sub-Saharan Africans, North Africans and poor ethnic-European French. The streets were pretty crowded and it was plainly not a tourist area. It was, however, close and walkable to central Paris.

And not without interest.

Froome is of a certain age

There was that notorious incident in 2012 on stage 8 of the Tour de France:

"When he accelerated on La Toussuire with four kilometres to go, Chris Froome left behind Bradley Wiggins, the rest of the group and, it appeared, team orders.

Twenty seconds later, he spoke into the race radio, slowed and the fragments drifted back together.

“They asked me to slow down,” Froome said after the finish, referring to Team Sky directeur sportif Sean Yates."

Back in 2012, Froome was aged 27 and Wiggins was 32. Wiggins cracked on that final slope - this chart might explain why:

Elite cyclists are at their strongest aged 27-29: by 32 they're down by a third

Cut to stage 12 of the Tour this year:

"Chris Froome's brief attack on teammate and race leader Bradley Wiggins that day in 2012 is now the stuff of legend and, though clearly not on the same level, there were question marks over Mikel Landa's role as Froome struggled on the brutally steep gradients.

The Spaniard, Froome's last teammate and himself in the top 10 overall, didn't look around as the maillot jaune lost ground, instead forging on to finish fourth on the stage."

Fabio Aru then took the maillot jaune, Landa forging ahead as Froome cracked. Froome is now aged 32, while both Landa and Aru are 27.

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There were other reasons touted. Richie Porte - ever loyal - said from his hospital bed that Froome had hit the wall due to messing up his feeding. Others noted that Aru (66 kg) and Landa (60 kg) are lightweight pure climbers while Froome (71 kg and a generalist climber/time-trialist) is quite a bit heavier.

But the age-related roll-off of performance is hard to argue against. Team Sky will be looking hard for their next GC candidate. A shame that Landa appears to be off for Astana or Movistar.

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Update (Saturday).

Froome emphatically back in yellow today. Not so much a new-found strength as clever tactics completely bamboozling Aru and his team Astana. Team Sky are head-and-shoulders smarter than most other teams.

A garden in summer

A trip to Wroughton, near Swindon today to visit my mother (with Elaine, pictured below). The hospice is next door to where she's staying and the gardens (and coffee shop) seemed a nice place to visit. A little video follows the picture. The word 'summer' is being used here in a purely calendric way as the mode of dress suggests.

The public garden at the Prospect Hospice, Wroughton

Not much posting here this past week. My excuse? Family visits trash the serenity needed to compose; the Tour was on and we spent hours trying to figure out whether Contador and/or Nibali were suffering post-juice burn-outs; plus not much new was really happening in the world worth commenting on.

Still, all that stuff is behind us now. I was about to install SWI-Prolog and then got diverted with backing up my data (to numerous hard disks and scattered USB drives - you can't have too much security!). Turns out that when your datasets are in the tens of Gigabytes and you need to encrypt (security!) this takes a while - like a day. So that was Monday and I'm finishing off things this afternoon. Prolog tomorrow?

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OK, we cracked: I put the central heating back on this evening.

Chris Froome out of 2015 Tour de France?

The Guardian writes:

"The 2015 Tour will include only 14 kilometres of individual time trialling, on day one in the Dutch city of Utrecht. This is the smallest amount since the race was relaunched after the second world war and the first time in recent years that the race has not included a time trial in the final week.

"In a statement issued shortly after the launch of the 2015 race route on Wednesday morning, Team Sky’s Kenyan-born Briton, who crashed out of the 2014 event in the first week, said, “The team and I will have to give it some careful consideration before we make any commitments to which of the grand tours I will compete in.” The 2013 winner was not present at the launch in Paris.

"Froome added: “The Giro with its inclusion of a long TT of 60 km and tough uphill finishes will make it a well-balanced race, which suits me well. If I did the Giro I may also be able to get myself back to top shape for the Vuelta and go there with a realistic chance of aiming for the win. In the past I’ve only targeted one grand tour each season but it could be a good opportunity for me to focus seriously on two.”

"The lack of time trialling in the 2015 Tour should suit the French riders, who staged a dramatic resurgence in the 2014 race, and as if to express their hope that history is on the home nation’s side, the organisers have included a finish at Pra Loup, the resort in the southern Alps where Bernard Thévenet toppled Eddy Merckx in 1975."

This is the kind of hyper-rational analysis which you expect from Froome's cerebral persona. I imagine Bradley Wiggins is aghast: as the 2013 winner, how could you not want to participate in the greatest bike race in the world? Where is Froome's sense of the grand tradition, the honour of cycling?

I wonder whether Team Sky just took a look at the route and figured they couldn't win? Certainly without Froome (and with Wiggins essentially retired from  road racing) they have no credible candidate for a win. Perhaps the notoriously neophilic Team is itself bored with the Tour, and is restlessly seeking new challenges.

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Not many posts at the moment as I'm tied up with various domestic matters. In-between I'm just finishing Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy and very dark, smart and techno-soapy it is, with a soupçon of grotesque horror. Greg Bear's War Dogs and Michel Faber's The Book of Strange New Things have arrived and joined the queue. I'm looking forwards etc.