Here's the Case For Getting Extremely Into the Tour de France

On one level, the Tour de France couldn't be simpler: It's a bike race. Fastest guy to Paris wins. Slightly more complicated? It's maybe better thought of as 21 races. Each day is a new "stage," and every rider starts at the same time—the overall winner is the man with the lowest time when you add each stage up. 

Where it really gets sticky is that the overall title is just one side of the Tour. Winning a single stage can be the crowning achievement in the career of most riders. In fact, some racers—the sprinters—specialize in flat stages, and don't even pretend to contend for the overall title. There's a subjective daily prize for “combativity”—style points, essentially. Oh, and the best hill climber wears polka dots. It's all a lot to figure out—and explains why the Tour can feel impenetrable to the first-time viewer. 

The new 8-part documentary Tour De France: Unchained is so good because it cuts right through all of that. The series, which covers last year's race, is from the team behind Full Swing and Formula 1: Drive to Survive, and they have again made a potentially-confounding sport thrilling and understandable in streamable increments. Like the F1 show, Unchained runs on micro-dramas powered by the kind of behind-the-scenes access you'd never see in mainstream American sports. It's essential streaming if you liked either of those shows. 

And as in F1, there are some real characters in the mix. Wout van Aert is probably the greatest overall cyclist in the world currently, even though he has no shot at an overall Tour win. Dutch sprinter Fabio Jakobsen earns a moment of triumph after nearly dying in a racing accident. Great French hope Thibaut Pinot might rather be on his goat farm.  

One particular highlight is the candor of Jonathan Vaughters, CEO of team EF Education-EasyPost. He's a familiar face to American cycling fans: a former teammate of Lance Armstrong, he admitted to doping during his career, and has spent the years since building and leading scrappy teams with an outspoken anti-doping commitment. 

His teams tend to be creative and entertaining, as evidence by collaborations with the skate brand Palace and a much-watched solo ride of the Tour de France route.  But when it comes to the actual races, EF doesn't have the budget of the European juggernauts. And the very first episode of Unchained features bracing footage of Vaughters giving a frank assessment of his team's talent and dismal performance in the year so far—and ends in wince-inducing montage of defeat.  

“I've always kind of taken the attitude of that the best strategy or even stance in life is just to be open and honest, and just be yourself and be transparent,” he told GQ. "So, the way I behaved on Netflix? The best path forward is just say it like it is." That frankness makes for great TV—particularly when EF turns it around for a season-defining stage win.

Just as Drive to Survive created many genuine F1 fans, the next step after binging Unchained is watching this year's race, which is streaming on NBC Sports and Peacock. The evening before his team took to the start line for the race's first stage, GQ got on the phone with Vaughters to discuss the Netflix show, how racing has changed since the Lance Armstrong era, and why the Tour de France is the perfect event for the work-from-home era.  

GQ: At least for the US audience, the Netflix series is reintroducing cycling to a lot of people who probably haven't thought about it since the Lance Armstrong years, and that's sort of your role in the first episode. You're the one who's like: “Here's a picture of me and Lance."

Jonathan Vaughters: That's for sure. The producers and directors of the series wanted me to close the chapter on the Lance Era and open a new chapter—basically saying, “Hey, you know, this is what happened. And it wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but it happened, and it's over.” 

You know, Lance has not been any part of the sport for over a decade. I know he's got his podcast and whatever, but he does not have any idea what is actually going on inside the peloton these days. He has no knowledge of how racing has progressed. And so that chapter is closed, it's over, it's done—it's long since been done.

So let's talk about this era and this year's race. The first stage is usually a time trial or a flat stage with little bearing on the final results. I'm no expert, but looking at it, it seems like it's gonna be an unusually exciting and punchy day of racing. 

Without a doubt. I mean, listen, the Tour is always intense from day one. A lot of times people think, Oh, it's a flat sprinter stage and nothing really happens. Well, let me tell you, a lot happens even on flat stages—the Tour is just tense. There are always more crashes than in any other race. We've got one new rider, James Shaw, who has never done the Tour de France, and he's obviously a little bit nervous. I just told him, This is like any other race in the world all year long. It's the same thing. It's the same riders. The only difference is, is in this race, no one uses their brakes.

So you get a stage like tomorrow where it's small roads [and] it's hilly? It's going to have an effect on the overall race. I don't know if anyone's going to win the Tour de France tomorrow, but there are definitely going to be some losers, without a doubt. The race tomorrow's is going to be dangerous. There are going to be some people knocked out of contention, whether that's physically or whether they're going to be literally knocked onto the road.

One of the ways I've been trying to sell this to my friends is that this is the perfect sport for the work-from-home era. Like, you're on a Zoom, but you can also keep track of the breakaway, learn the races within the race, and pay attention to the important parts.

I remember a long time ago, a friend of mine said cycling is the perfect podcast sport. I didn't quite understand what he was saying, but I do now. It's a sport that has really intense behind-the-scenes stories. That the tactics and the strategy are really nuanced, cerebral, and intense. There's the amount of backstabbing and little grinding rivalries—how those play out on the road, and how the overall strategy of each team and the minute-to-minute tactics of each team subtly change. 

It's like a novel. American sports are very much digestible on television in a two-hour sit down session. Cycling is like reading a novel—reading all the little nuance. At the same time, if you just try to sit down and read a whole novel at once, it's maybe a little bit too much, a little too boring. And that's the way cycling is. Like, if you just sit down and try to digest it all at once, it's like, whoa, too much. And you kind of don't know what's going on. And there's huge periods in the race where it looks like nothing is going on. But there is always something going on and you, you kind of have to like, dip into it and like pay attention and then take a little break and then dip into it. 

And you're right: It is the perfect work-from-home sport because you can read all the little storylines as they're evolving all day long while the race is happening and then really tune in for the grand finale. 

Can you give us some storylines that you're looking out for? I want to plug [promising young American] Neilson Powless here, because I think GQ readers should follow him, but I'd be curious for your take. 

Well, I think the thing is, I don't like giving away our strategies in advance. 

I get it. 

But I'll give you a riddle: I think that there's a unique way that Neilson Powles could do something that no other American has ever done before in the Tour de France—in a unique way, to make history this year. I think it's a very realistic goal for him. Now, it's, it's a little bit up to you to figure out what that is, but I think he's got a real honest shot at achieving something really special and something that no other American has ever done in the Tour.

This interview has been edited and condensed.