Tour de France 2022: six French teams departing from Copenhagen

Europe 1, with AFP 11:58 a.m., February 11, 2022

Six French teams will be at the start of the next Tour de France cyclist, on July 1, in Copenhagen.

The organizers revealed on Friday the contents of the two outstanding invitation cards, which were given to the B&B Hotels teams of Jérôme Pineau and TotalEnergies of Jean-René Bernaudeau.

They join AG2R Citroën, Arkea-Samsic, Cofidis and Groupama-FDJ, which were already qualified.

Compared to last summer, the only difference is the disappearance of the South African team Qhubeka, stripped in the meantime from the first world division.

The Tour plateau will therefore bring together a peloton of 22 teams (of 8 riders) since a 23rd formation had only been granted citizenship last year on an exceptional basis, due to the context linked to the pandemic.

For the two invitation cards available to the organizers, the suspense was low given the fact that two other second division teams, the Belgian Alpecin and the French Arkea-Samsic, qualified sportingly in addition to the 18 of the WorldTour ( including the three French companies AG2R Citroën, Cofidis and Groupama-FDJ).

It was even non-existent in the case of TotalEnergies, reinforced in the off-season by Peter Sagan, the Slovak seven times winner of the points classification of the Tour.

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B&B Hotels, which lost Bryan Coquard and Quentin Pacher, kept for its part the super-combatant of the Tour 2021, the Breton Franck Bonnamour, and his behavior was described as "valiant" by the director of the Tour Christian Prudhomme.

Enough for the Breton formation created in 2018 to have a third time an invitation against the candidacy of the Uno-X team, made up of young Norwegian riders mainly, and also Danish.

The French presence on the Tour

"It's a logical choice", explained Christian Prudhomme, insisting on Sagan, "an emblematic character as there are few in cycling", and on his teammate Pierre Latour, "a former best young rider in the Tour", as well than on Bonnamour, transformed into a pivot for the Pineau team.

The director of the Tour also said he was "curious to see what Victor Koretzky could give", 5th in mountain biking at the Tokyo Olympics and now turned to the road.

But he left the door open, in the future, for the Uno-X team of the last winner of the Tour de l'Avenir, the Norwegian Tobias Johannessen, winner last week at Mont Bouquet in the Etoile de Bessèges.

"We have invited them to several of our races and we are going to follow them carefully," said Christian Prudhomme, adding that the Danish contingent, starting in Copenhagen, would be of high quality given the performance of the country's riders (Vingegaard, Asgreen , Pedersen, Cort Nielsen, etc.).

Since 2020, the Tour has welcomed six French teams instead of five, the number of bets during the previous decade.

Without the number of riders from the host country approaching the contemporary ceiling of 46 representatives in 2011: the last two editions of the Tour brought together 39 French riders in 2020 and only 33 last year.