At 9am outside a budget hotel in Périgueux, EF Education-EasyPost directeur sportif Charly Wegelius convened his staff on the team bus to finalise how the squad would try to win stage nine of the Tour de France. The team targeted the first clear breakaway opportunity of the race, a discipline they have specialised in and used last year when Ben Healy won stage six and briefly held the yellow jersey. Organisers shortened the stage by 30 kilometres because of a red-alert heatwave, forcing EF to rework plans on the fly and to redraw kilometre markers in VeloViewer. Wegelius and fellow DS Tom Southam said that although months of route study happen after the route is published, the most important planning takes place each morning on the bus once startlists and race conditions are known. EF classifies days by opportunity and are prioritising nine stages this Tour, cutting sprint and GC days from their focus; the heat pushed the intermediate sprint to 14km, a change that materially altered likely breakaway formation. Meetings can be as brief as five minutes when the stage holds no interest, but on heat-affected, opportunity days the DSs painstakingly agree roles, timings and adaptations to other teams’ behaviour before the race starts.
