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9 hours ago
3
Key events
133km remaining: The peak of the Col de la Faucille approaches!
Anyway, moving on from pipes, Jura’s top industries include the unexpected entries bar turning, which is not some kind of pub crawl but a mechanical manufacturing process that removes material from a rotating object using automatic lathes to create parts with specific shapes, and “luxury goods subcontracting”, which so far as I can does not involve actually doing anything industrious at all, but rather telling other people to do it.
136km remaining: Some 11 riders have been dropped from the peloton, two-thirds of the way up the Col de la Faucille. They include St Michel’s Alison Jackson, and Amalie Dideriksen of Cofidis and Britain’s Pfeiffer Georgi of Picnic.
138km remaining: There has, apparently, been a small and non-serious crash. I meanwhile am still, mentally at least, in Saint-Claude where it turns out there is a Musee Pipe et Diamant, a joint museum created by the Association of Diamond Dealers from Haut-Jura and the Brotherhood of Master Pipe Makers from Saint-Claude. Two unlikely bedfellows, I’m sure you’ll agree. The Confrérie des Maîtres Pipiers de Saint-Claude, to give them their full and proper title, confers the highly-regarded Premier Fumeur de pipe de l’année award on the person who has done most to improve the lot of pipe smokers. It appears that they quite often announce that there is “pas de premier fumeur” in any given year, which I suppose is a good thing. The Confrérie was created in 1966 by Edgar Faure, whose first decision was to name himself the premier Premier Fumeur du pipe. The last winner, after nine years without one, was the writer Daniel Pennac in 2025.
Incidentally the British Pipesmokers’ Council ran a similar Pipeman of the Year award between 1964 and 2004, when they gave up due to a lack of outstanding pipemen. Previous winners include Jimmy Greaves, Ian Botham, Rod Hull, Harold Wilson and Warren Mitchell, who reportedly rejected the award “saying it was silly, that he smoked a pipe, but also used a lavatory brush so he might just as well be Lavatory Brush Man of the Year”.
That, I think, is enough about pipes.
143km remaining: Today’s stage largely takes place in the Jura region. While the list of specialities of the Jura, according to the Tour’s website, starts with “Comte cheese, Morbier cheese, Vache Qui Rit cheese” there’s a lot more to the place than that. It is home to Saint-Claude, “the world capital of pipe making” and site of a bloody enormous pipe should you ever want to be photographed next to such a thing, which can be found outside the town’s museum.
147km remaining: They’ve already started up the Col de la Faucille, today’s category one climb. The first part of today’s stage is a) perhaps the most interesting bit, apart from the flat and speedy approach to Poligny, and also b) not being televised. Only Wednesday’s fifth stage and Sunday’s concluding ninth are being televised in full.
The stage began a few minutes ago. The first interesting place today’s route passes is Cessy, the small town (population just under 6,000) under which the Large Hadron collider runs. It’s Cessy and it knows it, etc.
Not long before Cessy, and just before the French-Swiss border, is the fabulously-named Bossy. Bossy is part of the Collex-Bossy municipality and traditionally listed as such, but I for one would be a supporter of independence.
Before today’s stage heats up, catch up with what happened yesterday through the medium of Jeremy Whittle’s report:
Preamble
Hello world! Today, then, the second-longest stage of this year’s tour at 156.5km, and the first in the hills, with four categorised climbs and about 2,500m of elevation gain, with the steepest, longest and hardest section coming in the first 25km. By way of bonus the forecast is both hot (33-35C) and with a chance of rain, particularly in those tough early stages heading north out of Geneva.
The day ends in Poligny, and if the name of that town rings a bell that’s probably (well, there’s a slight chance that it’s) because you read about it in April, when it featured in the Guardian’s list of fun and fabulous reasons to visit France this year. Nothing to do with cycling – our reasoning was entirely cheese-related, Poligny being home to La Maison du Comté: not just somewhere to learn about a marvellous cheese, but also one of the finalists for the 10th French National Wood Construction Award in 2021!
(It didn’t win, because the Halle des Fenottes in Ancy-Dornot, despite basically just being a glorified roof on legs, was better. It is, to be fair, a fabulous roof)
Important fact: the average wheel of Comte, at 75cm in diameter, is 128mm, or about 1.2 times, bigger than the average wheel of a road race bicycle. According to Cycling Weekly “most wheel brands these days can hit 1,300g or lower in a 50mm-deep wheelset”, which makes the average single wheel of Comte 30.8 times heavier. You would, to summarise, not want to cycle up a mountain using wheels of Comte.
