Nice (AFP)

This is not the party imagined in 2018, when the announcement of the departure to Nice. The Great Loop, hit like the rest of the world by the Covid-19, had a bittersweet taste on the roads of the 1st stage on Saturday.

"The Tour will be the return of life", imagined its director Christian Prudhomme in April when the event was postponed. But the pandemic is there, and it was not the hustle and bustle of the big days of the Tour on Saturday in Nice, for the first big start in "Nissa" since 1981.

A single row of public was posed against the barriers of the place Jean-Moulin in the center of Nice, for a first stage in the rain.

On the positive side, nobody "massacred themselves for junk samples" of the caravan, according to Antoine Blondin's expression. There was something for everyone.

Eric Dyla, "Sunday cyclist" dressed in a vintage 2015 yellow jersey - "we offered it to me" - easily got his hands on a few sausages and other iconic Tour goodies.

He came by bike with his 25-year-old son Aurélien, whom he had already taken to see the Great Loop at the start of Monaco in 2009 and then on the Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer stages of the 2013 edition.

He who had decided Thursday to slip away from work to go to the presentation finally made the deadlock: "It was barricaded, it's a shame that we could not access it."

After the first passage of the peloton then of the caravan on Saturday (the order was reversed on this first stage), he planned to attend the second passage on the Promenade des Anglais - "if we manage to reach it".

No more crowds in the Côte de Rimiez, at the exit of Nice, the main climb of the 1st stage, climbed twice.

A public deserving if not dense because access by car was not allowed.

- "Strategic location" -

Among them, there are the neighbors, who only had to take a few steps to see the peloton. Like these two families with children who share the spoils of the caravan, spread out on a low wall.

And these three students, ten meters below, who "climbed four kilometers on foot" to "see them at a strategic place" at the end of a straight line, just before the banner indicating the top of the Rimiez coast .

“Even on the hill, they pass quickly anyway,” observes one of them, Guillaume Emerson with the eye of the regular. At 25, this "bicycle fan" has already come a slew of times on the Tour route. Even if the last dates back two years, in Alpe d'Huez.

"We were really close and there were lots of people," recalls her friend Damaris Criscuolo, who was already accompanying her, "disappointed" also at not being able to attend the presentation on Thursday.

"We were not drawn, she explains, but it was sad to see that all the places allocated were not occupied".

Despite the blackout panels installed along the streets to avoid gatherings, the trio "managed to find a place with a view of the stage," explains Guillaume.

"But we couldn't be near the teams and all the riders were masked," regrets Damaris.

"We can not complain, Nice did things well, with three stages", consoles Guillaume who has already planned where he will be placed the next day, in the Col d'Eze that the peloton will climb about thirty kilometers from the arrival.

© 2020 AFP