Six Things I Want to Learn From the Critérium du Dauphiné
The Mini-Tour de France kicks off on Sunday. Let's not waste an opportunity to learn.
The eight-stage Critérium du Dauphiné is the most notable warmup race for the Tour de France—most years, the top contenders will break from training to come to either this race or the Tour de Suisse. This is an ASO race, in France, so it carries a little extra verisimilitude for riders who want a taste of the real thing. It’s the most Tour de France a guy can have without taking his yellow jersey off.
Since 2012, the Dauphiné has been raced 12 times, and 11 of those race winners have fallen into one of two buckets. Six times, the winner of the Dauphiné has gone on to win the Tour: Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome three times, Geraint Thomas, and Jonas Vingegaard last year. Five winners have been fun off-the-wall results: Andrew Talansky in 2014, Jakob Fuglsang in 2017 and 2019, Dani Martínez in 2020, and Richie Porte in 2021. Primož Roglič in 2022 is the exception; he was far from an outside pick, and he went on to DNF the Tour from something like 20 minutes out of the lead that summer.
So let’s treat this race accordingly: It’s a recon ride, but it’s also an engine of chaos. Especially because this parcours 1) Avoids the big climbs to come in the Tour itself and 2) Doesn’t have a single sprint stage. So what are the big questions we want answered by the time the race ends a week from Sunday?
1. What kind of shape are Roglič and Remco in?
The two biggest GC names in this race are both pinning on race numbers for the first time since they got wiped out in the same corner at the Tour of the Basque Country. Vingegaard, the previous favorite for this year’s Tour, also got tangled up in that same corner, but he’s not back to race fitness yet.
Roglič and Evenepoel’s fitness is the most important subplot of this race—including, arguably, the battle for GC and stage wins. Because with Vingegaard still on the mend, these are the two riders most capable of stopping Tadej Pogačar from stomping through the Tour the way he did the Giro.
I know I said the Dauphiné is only 50/50 for predicting the Tour winner in the past 12 years, but I do want to dig a little deeper on that. In two of the remaining six seasons, the eventual Tour winner—Egan Bernal in 2019 and Pogačar in 2021—raced and won a different June stage race. In another case, Vingegaard in 2022, he arguably could’ve won the Dauphiné but deferred to Roglič, his senior teammate. In the other years there was a major upset at the Dauphiné—neither Talansky nor Fuglsang nor Martínez was a real threat to win the Tour, and 2020 was the compacted COVID schedule anyway. And in all three of those cases, the eventual Tour winner finished in the top 10 in the Dauphiné.
So while both Roglič and Evenepoel’s injury questions put them in a different category from Froome or other previous winners, and they have another month to get into shape, their performance here does matter. Maybe they take it easy on one of the mountain stages and finish out of the top 10 on GC, but if both of them are getting dusted halfway up the Plateau des Glières or losing multiple minutes in the time trial, it’s fair to start raising alarm bells.