Descend the Tour des Pyrénées in shock thanks to the exhibitions with a taste of revenge Tadej Pogacar and heads for the Alps, with Nice as a backdrop for an unprecedented final next Sunday. And people on the move are resting, which is the Big loopwith its nearly 5,000 people, in the surroundings of medieval Carcassone, where the United Arab Emirates and Movistar watched the European Cup final together on Sunday and only Adam Yates He didn’t end up celebrating. After Monday’s break, the start from Gruissan and the finish in Nîmes, the last opportunity for the sprinters. But how is all this put together (and taken apart)?
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Pantani’s record crushed by Pogacar and Vingegaard’s lament: “If he maintains this level…”
Pantani’s record crushed by Pogacar and Vingegaard’s lament: “If he maintains this level…”
The Tour is a caravan on foot, stage by stage across French territory. More than three weeks of starts and finishes, with its podiums, its parking lots, its VIP areas, its arches… They are decorated ditches, mountains filled with supporters, teams, security, journalists… A daily logistical puzzle that I solved 44 years in the shadow of XPO. “Our job is that no one notices us,” its president in Europe, the Spaniard, tells EL MUNDO. Luis Gomez.
“It’s a daily challenge, but a very beautiful challenge,” which includes a fleet of 47 trucks that transport 800 tons of material (fences, boards, podiums, arches, etc.). A team made up of 65 workers divided into three teams with three specific missions. But… “Every day, every afternoon, things can change. The planning can collapse due to changes in the weather, because a truck breaks down, because there are more people than usual or because the route is changed for a last-minute reason.” explains Gómez.
The departure team goes to the city where the stage will start the day before and works on the settings for four or five hours. The one with the goals, the same day of the stage in the morning so that everything is ready by noon. And the intermediate points also the day before if possible. All in coherence with the organization, the local authorities and the gendarmerie. And then of course the dismantling. “It is a daily adventure”, explains the Spanish manager, who emphasizes “the passion” that drives XPO and its employees, which is essential, as well as the experience of ensuring that everything goes well.
One of the XPO Logistics Tour trucks.
“Planning is not just the 21 days that the Tour takes place. We start working from October, when the routes are defined. We analyse physically, we see the difficult points to prevent in advance or adapt,” he explains. The main challenges take place in the special stages, the mountain ones, the time trials with start and finish close together or, for example, the one that took place on the white roads of Troyes. “It was spectacular, but for our heavyweights…”, explains Gómez, detailing the special vehicles they drive, “road trains”, with a second trailer added. “Depending on the stages, this second trailer is not used. The mountain ones are more difficult, but more beautiful. Manoeuvring on narrow roads. Our riders take it on as a personal challenge.”
“Like rally drivers”
These 60-plus drivers work for XPO, a logistics company with more than 200 centers and 14,000 employees in Europe alone (39,000 worldwide). And they spend a kind of foundrysince many more volunteers are coming forward. “The majority are French and they are proud. They spend three weeks away from home, working almost 24 hours a day, away from their families… And they are like rally drivers, they climb the hills before the Tour, take notes on the curves… The preparation is exhaustive, because time is limited.
Although there is no difficulty like the year of covid, when the Tour was postponed to September 2020 to take place with health measures that required drivers to be continuously tested, fences to be disinfected daily and double protection installed so that people do not gather and. keep safe distances. It should be noted that, in a normal stage of the Tour, if they were aligned, the barriers would occupy 10 kilometers.
Gómez and his team do not forget about sustainability, the responsibility of contributing to the care of the environment in these beautiful places that the Tour passes through. “Bicycles do not have an engine, but our trucks are essential. So we try to ensure that the C02 they emit is as low as possible (they use HVO biofuel). This year, as a novelty, we have introduced a fully electric truck. We are very sensitive to decarbonization,” concludes the president of XPO Europe.