Christian Prudhomme (Paris, 1960) became a journalist to be part of the tour and now that he is director of the tour, the man who makes the decisions, remains the kid who finished the baccalaureate went to Lille to study the race and in the soul he still had the images of his passion still record Roger de Vlaeminck … “Whenever I come to Lille and I get off the train I see myself about forty years ago arriving at the School of Journalism and telling me: I want to be a journalist, I hope it is true,” he says. And Lille has returned to press the giant button that launches the countdown of the 100 days that their tour will leave his Lille, and when he serves the journalists, he forgets the cold leader he is, he who does not know the compassion and maintains, in the name of the company he pays, Aso, a tremendous pulse with the international cycling union (UCI) and the conglomerate one For the control of world cycling, and with the teams, to which he denies his right to receive part of the benefits they generate to the organizers, and he is again the child who thinking about Tadej Pogacar always speaks of Eddy Merckx. As if the children’s flash forgive everything, speaks of the Paris-Roubaix, of course, and the words are eaten, so much accelerates, and his eyes shine, emotion.
“I do not like people who have no memory. I do not trust her,” he warns before the exercise of historical memory, of descent to the roots, which forces him to speak excited about the news that Tadej Pogacar, winner of the tour, will run the Paris-Roubaix, a career that also organizes his ASO, and to win it. “It will be great to see the winner of the last tour at the exit of the Paris-Roubaix. I remember that about ten years ago we were delighted to have Bradley Wiggins at the exit. He won the tour in 2012 and the Paris-Roubaix ended the ninth, but now we are in another league. We are even above the scale, because Pogacar will be at the exit, but it will be in the exit to win. “I sincerely thought it would come, but we are delighted to see him, especially after a milan-san rowing, in which we saw three immense champions fight for victory. It will be the fight of the bosses, a fight at the top. Mathieu van der Poel, winner the last two years, it remains the favorite for Paris-Roubaix, of course, but we will have an infernal fight between hands. everything and against all ”.
Pogacar excites Prudhomme as his children’s heroes excited him not only for his class, by his strength, because of his superiority, but because he is a true cyclist who knows how to handle himself in all the grounds, in the Strade Bianche, in the pave as he saw him in the Tour of 2022, on the white paths of the Tour in Troy last year. “We saw Pogacar in the cobblestones in 2022, in the Arenberg stage of the Tour de France. How he put the platoon in a row and escaped. What impression. He is capable of anything about the bike, it is incredibly skilled,” says the director of the Tour who has become an exception that his career comes out of a French city. If in 2022 the Great Boucle He started from Copenhagen, in 2023 of Bilbao and in 2024 of Florence, after Lille, he will leave Barcelona in 2026 and Glasgow in 2027. “But what I really like to Pogacar is to meet what I met as a child, see again an Eddy Merckx that I fought to win, and won, all the races of the beginning of the season. And of the whole year.
Finished his love soflama is as if Prudhomme felt reinforced. As if his sentimental love to the object of his business was a moral alibi that enlarges the next day at the dictation ceremony: it brings together a hundred children selected from the city’s schools and, as a language teacher, submits them to an exercise of dictated with an article about the tour published in L’équipe. Children strive, politicians and the police prefect that accompany them use their authority to claim the text and copy it blatantly. The message: the tour is France, its heart. Who will dare to challenge him?
Next Monday, the UCI council will vote in favor of the request of the organizers to add another team, up to 23, the participants in the great three, turn, tour and return, the latter also owned by ASO. “We do it to protect and safeguard the National Second Division teams,” he says, and recalls that the races are obliged to invite the 18 WorldTour teams and the two best of the Second Division, which would allow them, in the format of 22, to invite only two. The runners also agree, and most teams. They do not support it, for diverse reasons, the visma, the UAE and the Lotto. In the shadow of the International Federation, and supported by Richard Plugge, the pattern of the visionary vism of a new organizational structure of cycling, a more equitable cast of the loot, moves One Cycling, financed by the Saudi sovereign background, an economic bottomless well that has already anticipated its intention to make the turn of Italy and other races organized by RCS, such as San Remo, such as San Remo, Lombardy A giant prepared for a fight with the always boss, the Tour of all the French and the heart of Prudhomme.
