Adrien Petit’s painful feat at the Tour de France

Adrien Petit will never win a Tour de France, he will hardly be able to get on the podium of a great stage race or in one of the classic ones that give prestige to a career. He is one of the many who in the group do not have the task, the burden and the honor of winning, one of those runners who give themselves, their efforts, to others. He is not a man for solitary alpine escapes, not even hills, his work is usually carried out at the head of the group to try to ruin the plans of those who try to escape from the others in search of a happy, winning day. He doesn’t do it out of malice, he can’t do anything else: team orders.

Adrien Petit was born in Arras almost thirty-three years ago. “Terra dura l’Artois” – a region that was, now Pas-de-Calais – wrote the novelist Georges Bernanos. “A land that teaches that to achieve something you need to adapt and never stop fighting, to be harder than stones”. Adrien Petit put it into practice by bike, finding his favorite dimension in the neighboring department, the Nord, on the stones towards Roubaix. You don’t finish three times in the top ten in Paris-Roubaix if you can’t adapt, if you aren’t harder than stones.

You can’t even do what Adrien Petit did in the first two Alpine stages of this Tour de France. He didn’t win, runners like Adrien Petit (almost) never win among the peaks of the Alps. But he did something extraordinary nonetheless. He arrived at the finish, thirty-eight minutes after Carlos Rodriguez in Morzine and thirty-five minutes after Wout Poels in Saint-Gervais Mont Blanc. He wasn’t obvious. He is never when you have a cut more than ten centimeters long on the shinbone, one half a dozen centimeters under the buttock and pains throughout the body for falling and breaking the fall of others.

He walked with difficulty, it was hard to bend and bend his leg and you only need to have moved the pedals once in your life to understand how many times you bend a leg on a bicycle. She could have left the Tour de France, been taken to the hospital and gone home. No one would have blamed him. He had 146 kilometers to pedal and over 4,000 meters in altitude to climb on Saturday; 179 and 4,500 on Sunday. He has covered them all, he has not even reached the last place: le Grande Petit.

On Sunday he was awarded by the Tour de France as a fighter of the day, the recognition that the organization gives at the end of each stage “to those who have shown the most commitment, generosity and the best sporting spirit”, says the regulation. The Tour had often forgotten about those who fight like hell to get to the finish line.

“It’s a shame I had to fall to get on the podium, but it’s a pleasure, it’s a nice recognition”, commented Adrien Petit as he came down from the awards ceremony stage. He then added: “Today I experienced an ordeal and I would not wish it on my worst enemy”. He tolerated it, because riders like him, those who know that cycling is hard work but above all sacrifice, hardly ever think of themselves. They tolerate it, because sooner or later someone will need them and they can’t help but be present.

Beats, cuts, pain and a colored number, the one that was red and now has a shade that is not clear if it is gold or ochre, to be displayed on the shirt today as the Tour restarts after the rest day.