Thibaut Pinot will not compete in the Tour de France 2021. -

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  • Thibaut Pinot has announced that he is giving up on the 2021 Tour de France.

  • Aligned with the Giro, he wants to find pleasure without necessarily betting everything on the general classification.

  • If the tricolor climber promises that he will return to the Tour, we feel he is less and less willing to fight for the win. 

Thibaut Pinot has stopped lying to himself, and too bad if others continue to tell nanny tales in their corner.

Starting with his manager Marc Madiot and his Gaullian outbursts, which we would miss if they did not exist, even on a lugubrious TF1 Loto TV set like a Moscow morgue.

The boss of Groupama-FDJ and his leader of hearts presented the coming season of the best French team in the peloton.

The Giro in a new perspective

No Pinot on the Tour de France, as we suspected, but always the heavenly faith of his manager, who imagines his champion climbing the pantheon every morning upon waking: “Obviously Thibaut has the potential to win the Giro!

When you have the chance to rub shoulders with him on a daily basis, Pinot is anything but what people say about him.

If there's a guy who likes to hurt his face, it's him.

He doesn't always have the words to say it, but he has a lot of things that others don't have, and that is commitment.

He gives 100% of what he has, and that deserves respect ”.

The Franc-Comtois listens distractedly, the air of the guy who has moved on.

So he puts the shapes for a while.

"The Pink jersey is the most beautiful to go after the Yellow jersey".

"I need to do a big Giro to come back stronger on the Tour de France 2022".

However, it suffices to dig a little to see that the boy is as frank as a backing donkey.

"When it's a hassle, the Tour is the worst place you want to be"

If Pinot had for a moment convinced that the bike owed him one after his quitting in 2019, the Stations of the Cross of the Tour 2020, completed without knowing it on the faded asphalt of Nice, seems to have shaken him more deeply. .

“The Tour de France, when you're at the top, it's a dream.

But when it's a hassle, it's the worst place you want to be.

In September, all I wanted was to go and hide every evening after the stage ”.

The best day of its season?

When Madiot managed to make the sponsors swallow his absence for the 2021 edition, in favor of a Démare-Gaudu team alluring on the bike, but less selling to the general public.

“Yes, it was a relief to know that my decision had been accepted despite competing interests,” concedes Pinot.

After my last two complicated Tours, I needed a new program ”.

The Giro refuge, the only race he deigns to watch on TV when he is not busy milking a goat or finishing a game of pétanque in the cool.

Less to escape media pressure than to rediscover pleasure in expressing a talent that is too often prevented, he swears.

We still feel that the criticisms about his physical fragility bark him, even if the gossip often lives up to expectations, with him.

Towards the end of a career as a free electron?

"I am 30 years old and when I hear certain things that people still say about me ... Since time I have understood that people talk a lot for me".

Let us rectify, therefore, since he is there.

Pinot forced himself for two years to play this role of Bernard Hinaut's successor, or at least whoever wants to claim it.

He doesn't want to anymore.

No longer want to rub in the peloton every minute that passes to avoid a border, a blow of calgon, whatever.

No longer want to "run to the millimeter", only to find the adventurous feeling of life.

Madiot can say what he wants, but it looks like a polite farewell to the general classification, as we hear it among the cadors.

Including on a more calm race like the Giro, where we almost have time to look at the olive trees on the seaside roads. "I'm not going to take my head anymore, I'm going to try to let my desire speak without putting myself pressure.

It worked better on certain big Tours where I went a little without knowing, like the Tour in 2014 or the Vuelta in 2018 ”.

Pinot feels compelled to say "he's not the type to get up and waste 30 minutes."

Missing more than that.

"I'm not going to take my head anymore"

The bluff part in there now.

It will surely depend on his behavior in Italy, where he could find another revenge, the Colombian Bernal.

Moreover, the best tricolor climber did not check anything in his program after the month of May.

The Olympics "make him dream", of course, a few classics are envied along the way, perhaps a Liège by retirement… A career in between in short.

Projecting the illusion of a Grand Tour winner for some time to come, or chasing prestigious races and stages.

In three months, we'll be fixed, without knowing what to wish for the most endearing runner of his generation.

Well, yes, but it is a way of protecting ourselves, too, from a new addiction.

The crazy hope of July, we have already given a lot.

Sport

"It's not the right course for me" ... It's official, Thibaut Pinot will not do the Tour de France but will go to the Giro

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