Racing in France is set to get back under way with the Route d’Occitanie, where one of the main topics of interest will be the question of how Team Ineos squeeze three Tour de France winners into one Tour de France team, and whether they even intend to do so.
While that debate will hog the headlines, Occitanie will also have far more personal significance for Ineos’s riders and staff. The fourth and final stage starts in Lectoure, just a few dozen kilometres north of Auch, the home town of Nicolas Portal, Ineos’s lead DS who died at the age of just 40 in early March.
In the months since Portal’s shockingly premature death, it has sometimes seemed that the importance of his role as a lead directeur sportif and his almost unparalleled ability in carrying it out successfully has been forgotten. As the possible leadership permutations involving Egan Bernal, Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome have been debated, the fundamental part that Portal played in eight Grand Tour victories has been rather overlooked.
Initially offered the job of assistant DS at the end of 2010 season because Dave Brailsford and many others at Sky had quickly picked up on his impressive qualities as a communicator, Portal wasn’t sure that it was the right time for him to swap the saddle for a seat in a team car, partly because he felt his English wasn’t good enough to merit this. Yet after three weeks of mulling the idea, the Frenchman accepted the new post. For the next two seasons, he worked closely with Sky’s lead DS Sean Yates, learning everything he could from the Englishman.
Portal, who came from mountain biking and maintained the individuality associated with that discipline, regarded Yates, with his earrings and tattoos, as a kindred spirit. They clicked as directeurs sportifs, both of them drawing on a fund of racing knowledge built up as team captains on the road and both equally laidback and calm when directing and advising their orders, even in moments of high tension. When Yates left Sky at the end of 2012, Portal was promoted to lead DS in his place.
The Frenchman’s rise to the top of Sky’s managerial hierarchy in 2013 coincided with Froome’s arrival at the same place on the roster. That year, the Briton won the Tour and Portal was vital to that success, most famously on the “you’re now riding for Movistar” stage through the heart of the Pyrenees to Bagnères de Bigorre. As events conspired against Sky on the first of five categorised climbs, Froome, having taken the yellow jersey for the first time the previous day, found himself isolated as Garmin went on the rampage.
With Brailsford agog in the passenger seat next to him, Portal coolly informed his leader that he swapped from Sky to Movistar and now had to follow their leaders, Nairo Quintana and Alejandro Valverde, everywhere they went, and especially in the valleys between the climbs where he most vulnerable. If he lost a wheel there, Froome would have been a one-day yellow jersey wonder. Instead, largely thanks to Portal, he survived the ordeal and in doing so took a huge stride towards a first Tour title.
The story of that day is one that Portal told regularly. What stuck out, though, was what he didn’t say about it, that having ridden for Movistar for four seasons in their Caisse d’Epargne days, he sensed that they would ride conservatively, aiming to knock Sky’s Richie Porte out of second place on GC rather than going full out with offensive against Froome. This preternatural ability to assess what his rivals would do was what made Portal the best DS in recent Grand Tour history and the first since Cyrille Guimard in 1983 to win the Tour with three different riders.
During this long period of success, I’m sure I wasn’t the only journalist who would make a beeline for Portal almost every day at the Tour. He was always welcoming, even on particularly stressful days, often chomping through a chocolatine as he talked. More importantly, though, he always gave you an insight or a quote that made talking to him very worthwhile.
To give an example, early on in last year’s race I asked him about the Pyrenean stage to Prat d’Albis above Foix. It’s a typically Pyrenean climb, he told me, rising in steps, gentle one moment, brutal the next. The key, he said, were the final 3-4km to the summit, where the gradient eases off considerably. If you’ve got a rival on the rack before that point, he explained, then you should be able to gain considerable time on them on in that easier final section. Come race day, Egan Bernal gained a vital minute on fast-fading race leader Julian Alaphilippe in those kilometres. Portal’s knowledge, research and ability was so extensive that he could serve up numerous insights of this kind for every stage, covering the quality of the road surface, the likely wind direction on a climb at a certain point in the afternoon, where rivals would likely to attack and when the Sky/Ineos riders should go on the offensive themselves. He was, as the stats underline, the best since Guimard and one of the best of all time.