A Good Tour de France Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

ORCIÈRES-MERLETTE, France — When Richard Carapaz spread his arms in celebration after pounding up the final climb of Stage 18, I felt a sense of relief.

The https://www.instagram.com/p/DbJeEqtEbvN/?img_index=1">champagne flowed, the tears streamed.

The hundreds of days that dozens of support staff worked in the cloistered, unforgiving world of professional cycling had paid off.

EF Education-EasyPost had finally validated its strong Tour de France with a stage win.

The Tour de France awards a wide bounty of prizes beyond the yellow jersey to its 23 teams.

You can target one of the other three jerseys, which take comprehensive three-week efforts and team support.

You can go after one of the 21 stages, more a matter of tactics than strategy, and also subject to the whims of the biggest teams.

Or you can scrap for the smaller stuff like winning some intermediate sprints, wearing one of the jerseys for a day or two, or simply being visible.

Variety is one part of what makes the Tour's competitive landscape so well-tended; the other is scarcity.

While every team will enter the race with different goals, there's not enough to go around.

The fun part is seeing which prizes each team pursues, who that puts them in conflict or alliance with, and how their plans are forced to evolve over the three weeks of racing.

What does a successful Tour look like?

Every team has a different answer.

EF is the perfect team through which to understand how complicated and intriguing this all is.

Unlike UAE or Visma, EF wasn't going to target the yellow jersey.

But they're also stronger than the bottom feeders, and as such have larger ambitions than merely notable participation.

For example, Lotto have had a good Tour despite having only won some https://www.letour.fr/en/video/6550/the-combativity-award">combativity awards, simply because they keep putting riders in doomed breakaways and having them hold on longer than chasing teams expect.

Last year, https://defector.com/ben-healy-wins-one-for-the-romantics">EF had a dream Tour, with Ben Healy taking a stage win, finishing tenth overall, spending some time in the yellow jersey, and winning the overall combativity prize.

This time around, Healy didn't come into the Tour fully healthy, and though EF had superstar rider Richard Carapaz back, he was also https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7240641/2026/04/29/richard-carapaz-injury-giro-ditalia/">recovering from surgery and couldn't realistically target another Tour podium.

So it was time to win some stages.