'It's like I'm having a heartache right now': Inside the hardest ever Tour de France opening stage

There are various ways the Tour de France could start, such as a short prologue, a longer time trial or a bunch sprint. The 2024 edition chose none of those tried-and-tested options, instead plucking for a brutal opening stage that the peloton has declared the toughest ever way to begin a Grand Tour.

More than 3,500 climbing metres were packed into a 206km route from Florence to Rimini, with temperatures nudging almost 40C in central Italy. Dsm-firmenich PostNL scored a memorable one-two, Frenchman Romain Bardet claiming his first ever yellow jersey after he and his young teammate Frank van den Broek pulled off a team masterclass.

But for the chasing peloton and the strung-out gruppettos behind, the Italian Grand Départ will live long in the memory for its brutality, rather than its fairytale finale. British sprinter Mark Cavendish suffered so badly that he only made the day's 49-minute time cut by 10 minutes.

“Insane, really insane,” reacted Ilan Van Wilder of Soudal-QuickStep. “I never experienced anything like this before. The parcours, the pace, but above all the heat, 38C nearly all day. It was terrible, really terrible. I am absolutely cooked, it’s like I am having a heartache right now.”

Van Wilder is expected to be one of Remco Evenepoel’s key helpers in the forthcoming weeks and finished in the lead group behind the victorious DSM duo, but the Belgian admitted that staying hydrated and cool during the stage was a constant challenge.

“I think at one moment I was drinking one litre per hour,” he said, “and then I was always pouring extra water on my arms, legs, and head. I had my eyes in my back, my stomach – I just could not keep cool. At one moment you overheat so much that you can’t push anymore and that’s why a lot of guys dropped early.”

Silvan Dillier, riding his fifth Tour de France, was one of the last riders to cross the finish line, and the Alpecin-Deceuninck domestique was physically and mentally exhausted after a savage first stage. “The parcours was one thing, but the heat was the next level,” he said.

“It’s not been super hot so far in Europe [this summer] so this was a shock for everyone and I saw many, many guys struggling with the heat today.

“People were riding with their handbrake on because you feel you are limited with the heat. People you would expect to ride at the front, to be with the first 50 guys, were all of a sudden dropped out of the back of the peloton. We raced as hard as possible today but it wasn’t possible to do any more.”

Simon Geschke, similarly a veteran in the peloton, echoed Dillier’s words. “That was super hard, the hardest opening stage I’ve ever done,” the Cofidis rider said. “Everyone was fighting with themselves. The heat is so limiting – you can’t push the same power.”

American Neilson Powless of EF Education-EasyPost concurred. “I’ve done five Tours and one Vuelta a España and that definitely felt like the hardest opening stage yet,” he said. “With the heat and the climbs, put together it was an insanely hard course, and it's the same again tomorrow.”

The temperature and humidity levels are expected to remain the same for stage two’s traverse from Cesenatico to Bologna, although with less than half the climbing metres as day one, the peloton shouldn’t suffer as much as they did en-route to Rimini.