A last Tour de France before the keel: Thibaut Pinot was selected on Tuesday by his Groupama-FDJ team for a final lap on the roads that made him so popular, before hanging up at the end of the season. This will be the tenth time that the 33-year-old Franc-Comtois will participate in the Grande Boucle, which will leave on July 1 from Bilbao. His best result remains a third place in 2014. The sprinter Arnaud Démare, however, was not selected.
“It’s a purely sporting choice. The race and the ground have spoken. It was a difficult selection to establish, in particular the decision not to retain Arnaud Démare. I understand and I hear his disappointment”, declared the manager of the Marc Madiot team at AFP.
Participation not necessarily planned
While each team will be made up of eight riders, Groupama-FDJ has selected five for the moment: the leader David Gaudu, Thibaut Pinot, but also Valentin Madouas, the Luxembourger Kevin Geniets and the Swiss Stefan Küng. The presence of Pinot will delight the many fans of the Mélisey climber who will return one last time to the roads on which he had shone with a thousand lights in 2019 before having to give up, hit in the thigh.
At the start of the season, it was not necessarily expected that Pinot would compete in a final Tour de France. For his final season, he wanted to focus on the Tour of Italy, where he took fifth place overall in May. But he showed such form at the end of the Giro that his team felt he had his place in the workforce, especially since he himself wanted to participate in the high mass in July. “I’m very happy to do my last Tour de France. With the form I had coming out of the Giro and the form I still have 15 days later, it would have been really frustrating not to be part of this team” , commented Pinot.
“I hope to do the most beautiful Tour de France possible and have the legs that I had during the last week of the Giro”, added the Franc-Comtois who is currently training in La Cluzaz where he takes the opportunity to recognize some alpine stages.
Pinot will support Gaudu
At the Tour de France, his role will be to support David Gaudu, fourth last year and who showed signs of weakness in the Dauphiné last week (30th). But not only. “We are in a period when the race is gaining momentum, and quite often from afar. In this respect, Valentin Madouas and Thibaut Pinot are important assets in our game”, explains Marc Madiot. If “Gaudu is the leader”, insists Madiot, “the idea is to go modestly in the direction taken by teams like Ineos and Jumbo-Visma”, which align several runners capable of “weighing on the race”.
“Last year, we had three riders in the top fifteen (Gaudu 4th, Madouas 10th and Pinot 14th, editor’s note). We will try to accentuate this further”, supports the manager of Groupama-FDJ. Winner of three stages of the Tour de France, in 2012, 2015 and 2019, Pinot could thus play his card on certain days, knowing that he had been criticized last year for not having been of great assistance for Gaudu.
Starts “disgusted”
If Pinot can rejoice, the non-selection of Démare is a huge disappointment for the Picard sprinter with 93 victories. He had already not competed in the Tour in 2022 but was optimistic of being able to return there this summer. The hypothesis had given rise to a psychodrama within the team this winter when Gaudu claimed on social networks that he did not want Démare on the Grande Boucle, before apologizing. Out of luck at the start of the season, Démare had recently regained form by winning a stage in the Boucles de la Mayenne and the Brussels Classic.
“I am angry, disgusted because I worked for”, lamented Démare in the newspaper The Team. “I understand that he is bitter with me, reacted Madiot. I have nothing to reproach him for, he is an exemplary runner.” “It’s a choice that tore me apart but I’m in a position to have to put together the best team possible,” added the manager who says “assume”. “It’s neither Pinot nor Gaudu who decides the composition of the team at the Tour de France, it’s me,” he insisted.