First thought: bike races may go on for hours, but they are decided in a flash. Blink, and you miss it.

From a cycling commentator’s perspective, there was something pleasingly reassuring about the first few stages of the Tour du Haut Var (I refuse to call it anything else, unless pursued through the courts to do so).

This time of year is a period of deep-set panic. When we are waiting to make our commentary debuts for the season (mine starts with Paris-Nice this year), we devour race footage to try and get up to speed on a peloton that has mutated into something different over the winter.

New sponsors, bafflingly similar kits, most of which are either red or white this year it seems, and transfers that you already know will trip you up for weeks and months to come. He wasn’t a part of the Haut Var peloton, but as I write this I am watching a feed of the UAE Tour and have noticed that Gregor Mühlberger rides for Movistar. How was this allowed to happen? What was he thinking? It’s insane. Austrians have no place alongside Alejandro Valverde.

Anyway, back to France.

The first two differing uphill finishes of the Haut Var threw up some decent attacks from familiar figures. Nairo Quintana had a little bit of a dig on stage one, which was good to see (though French TV only offered us a miserly non-live 2 minutes of highlights). Quintana’s move to Arkea Samsic had promised so much this time last year, but post-lockdown, delivered much less and ended in double knee surgery.

Stage winning form from Bauke Mollema (long drag of a climb) and Michael Woods (punchy wall) produced popular results from well-liked campaigners. Also, the strength of Greg van Avermaet in his new and eye-catching colours was like watching the GVA of a couple of years ago. We’ve missed him of late.

Ineos came to the race with a couple of Grand Tour winners in their team, as well as a couple of former world champions of various different kinds. Rohan Dennis looks like he’s picked up exactly where he left off last year, relishing his role as a super super domestique deluxe.

There was even a short-lived but very enjoyable flash of anger from Dennis when he’d swung off the front on stage 2 only to find that his teammate van Baarle was nowhere to be seen. This led to Dennis turning into an Australian wicket keeper, with van Baarle playing the role of an Indian batsmen (niche cricket reference, folks) and Geoghegan Hart seemingly on the radio trying to smooth things over. That was one of the more satisfying cameos of the race, as was middle-distance runner Tom Pidcock’s race – at the back with 10k to go, one of his favourite distances. Suddenly he appears by magic on the front with 3 to go, catches the breakaway and sets the battle up. Nothing if not dynamic, the Pidcock.

And then came stage three with its difficult to manage breakaway being dictated by three of the best from Groupama FDJ.

Israel Start-Up Nation had their work cut out to control a frightening group of GC players and opportunists up the road. Up and down and around the hills to the north of Nice and Menton the race wound, offering absurdly tantalising views of the Mediterranean behind perched villages that were heartbreakingly beautiful for anyone whose yearning for travel is built into their DNA. When will this enforced distance from life simply be a distant memory, and no longer an ongoing agony?

Ah, but the race blew the locked doors off.

Over the Madone it produced one of those wonderful hanging outcomes where one of ten or so riders could plausibly win, something at one point or another almost all of them almost did. Distinct groups with varied motivations all descending with a minute of one another and 20k still to run. All this, with the still-winter sun slipping ever lower and the shadows extending. The low autumn sun had been such a feature of the postponed Vuelta last year and this felt like the racing had never gone away.

And in the end, despite Groupama FDJ throwing everything; heart, soul and sinew at the race, they came away with nothing more than our affection and gratitude, which was such a Groupama FDJ thing to do that it made the world feel whole and normal.

Gianluca Brambilla won even though no one had said that Gianluca Brambilla would win this race, packed with world class talent as never before. This was mainly because Gianluca Brambilla hadn’t won a bike race for almost five years, since he raced for Quick Step, took a Giro and wore the Maglia Rosa then went to Spain and won at the Vuelta too.

After years of service to others, this was a very handsome victory against sustained and serious opponents. Which was great. I like him.

I like bike racing.

Ned Boulting

The Road Book presents “The Red Line”: An alternative to a simple race report, bringing you regular impressions and musings to complement the racing calendar.

There was something a little bit dishonest about the Tour de la Provence’s Queen Stage on Saturday. Not because of anything that the riders did or didn’t do (I hope), but because of the way the race was branded. Mont Ventoux’s snow-locked summit was never going to be accessible to the race in the middle of February. Indeed, the organisers were lucky to get it as far up as Chalet Reynard. The problem with naming a stage finish after the most identifiable mountain in world racing, and then only taking it two thirds of the way up is that it leaves the viewer feeling a bit short-changed. The climb through the forest to Chalet Reynard is uninspiring, to be perfectly honest. The road is quite wide and rather straight. The forest is dark, even when not shrouded in fog as it was on Saturday. It’s actually just the bit of the climb that has to be got through before the race starts. Ventoux begins after you turn left and change direction at the overpriced café in the lay-by.

Not that any of these aesthetic qualms would have been of concern to Ivan Sosa, who adds his name to the list of “not really Mont Ventoux Mont Ventoux winners”, a club which includes Thomas de Gendt who went on to win the stage of the Tour that finished there in 2016 when Chris Froome was left without a bicycle in a bicycle race. That day a howling gale prevented the race from going higher.

It was good to see Sosa’s devastating attack produce a race win, and his extraordinary talent begin to come to fruition. It felt like an important moment in his career, and means that we must now consider him to be the rider we always knew he had the potential to be; namely, yet another potential Grand Tour winner to go with Ineos’s roster of proven champions Thomas, Bernal, Geoghegan Hart, Carapaz, as well as major talents like Porte, Martinez, Yates (A) and Sivakov. And Pidcock, too. Besides, I have a particular fondness for Sosa, having been invited into his parental house back in 2018 when I toured Colombia with fellow Road Book writer Matt Rendell, who was working on his forthcoming magnum opus Colombia Es Pasión. Sosa’s mother cooked us lunch, and his father showed us around the little farm where they grow beans other vegetables. Like almost all of the Colombian riders I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet, he’s a bright-spirited, open and immensely dedicated young man, who demands our respect.

But the real revelation of stage three was the immense contribution of Carlos Rodriguez, the Spanish climber who only turned twenty a couple of weeks ago. This is his second year with Ineos, though you’d be completely forgiven for not knowing that, such was his anonymity last year. But the pull he did on the front to set up Sosa’s attack and shred the group was as good as any seen from the Sky/Ineos domestique over the years. Watch out for his contribution as the season progresses. It could be considerable. And who knows what the future might hold for him.

Other than that, the race will be remembered fondly by Davide Ballerini, the winner of the first two stages, and wearer of the Mondrian-inspired leader’s jersey. Ballerini is a rider who at the age of 26, has now finally figured out who he is and what he does best: Turns out he’s a phenomenally talented and versatile sprinter, the kind of rider who can win bunch kicks and one day classics equally – in the mould of Alexander Kristoff or John Degenkolb perhaps.

Until his arrival at Deceuninck Quick Step he spent time working as a domestique for Astana or getting in doomed breakaways with Androni Giocattoli. Indeed the first time I became aware of him at all was in 2017 when he won the King of the Mountains classification at Tirreno Adriatico. I remember how he clinched the final points needed to win. He was in yet another breakaway, competing on a climb against his only credible rival Alan Marangoni. Meanwhile, 5 minutes back down the road the peloton had been held up by a level crossing. When this information was radioed up to the front of the race, it was the exact moment that Ballerini had just attacked Marangoni in the final few hundred metres of the climb. It was then that a race regulator on a moto rode up alongside Ballerini, within sight of the finish, and stopped him. He was instructed to wait until the peloton had started to move again. Fortunately, when the riders were waved off again Maragoni refused to contest Ballerini for the win, and, incensed with the ham-fistedness of the commissaires, the Italian rode clear to seal his victory. Funny how these things stick in the memory.

Anyway, it was a good race, capped off today by a relatively rare win from Phil Bauhaus, who’s another name to reckon with in a sprinter’s field which continues to intrigue. It’s hard to know these days with any definitive certainty who is the fastest rider in the world. It’s been that way for a while, since the distant domination of Cavendish, and then, perhaps more briefly, Kittel.

2021’s shaping up all right in this narrow sense at least. Thank God for road racing.

Ned Boulting