procycling

There was also the Tour of Guadeloupe (French island in West Indies), a farcical 2.2.

In this video https://x.com/LeGruppetto/status/1952995645058388165 , the 2^nd^ in GC has a puncture and stops. Then he realises he's fucked, because his car has gone ahead of the peloton. A teammate rides backwards, which is completely forbidden, to give him his wheel. But they can't remove the wheels because of the bloody disc brakes wheels without fast locks, and they haven't got a key either. So the leader takes the bike of his teammate and goes. But there's something he doesn't like, or perhaps he was radioed that someone came with a key,and now he's riding backwards too! That's even better than Vingegaard and Visma's mess. Epilogue not on video: he magically caught up with the peloton. The magic (the help of a car) owed him a 1 minute penalty.

In this one, https://x.com/CyclingLegend_/status/1952290921707655271 , one rider is pulled by his car. Very classical. A couple of riders received a 5 minutes penalty! (I didn't know it was possible to give such large time penalties.)

More original, https://la1ere.franceinfo.fr/guadeloupe/tour-cycliste-de-guadeloupe-2025-c-est-tres-grave-2-coureurs-exclus-pour-avoir-rejoint-le-peloton-sans-faire-tout-le-parcours-de-la-2e-etape-sous-les-yeux-du-commissaire-1610574.html : 2 Dutch riders (Niels Tenniglo and Huub Van Kapel) have taken a shortcut (or most likely stopped in a place where the course will come back after making a 30 km loop), and are hiding behind a car on the roadside, waiting for the peloton to arrive and attempt to blend in. They have been disqualified.

One day, ahead of the race, 4 publicity cars crashed into each other. It created a massive traffic jam, and when the riders came, there were cars parked on both side of the motorway, as not all of the traffic could have been evacuated yet.

Tour de l’Ain 🇫🇷: class .1, Aug 6 to 8

Gaudu's return to competition is as bad as his departure after the Giro. On the 1^st^ stage, don't let the final result fool you, he and his team came back because it was a long descent + flat finish, and because Uijtdebroeks, his teammate and Prodhomme who had broken away in the climb without being followed at all, refused to cooperate. On the 2^nd^stage, today, Gaudu was dropped in a 6% climb 50 km from the finish line, while there were still 40 to 50 riders in the peloton, including several riders from small Contis; he arrived over 20 minutes behind the winners.

While Gaudu and FDJ are well below their rank (despite being the team with the lightest program at the moment), 2 guys are clearly above the rest of the peloton: Uijtdebroeks (Visma) and Prodhomme (Decathlon), the latter looking stronger than the former. However, because of their bad cooperation (the Belgian attacked Prodhomme multiple times, Prodhomme is reluctant to relay), after 2 days they are less than 1 minute ahead of 6 other riders.