The excuse ran out in Nice

For as long as I’ve followed this sport, there has been a ready-made explanation for why French teams don’t win the biggest races. You know the lines. The budgets are impossible. The state-backed superteams have distorted everything. French employment law and French taxes make the maths unworkable. We are a small French team, doing things the proper way, and the proper way doesn’t win Tours anymore.

Then, on the Sunday just past in Nice, a “once” small French team won the Tour de France.

Not the men’s one, obviously. Nobody French has won that since Bernard Hinault in 1985, a drought now old enough to have its own midlife crisis. I mean FDJ-Suez, who put Demi Vollering in yellow at the Tour de France Femmes at the end of a season so lopsided it barely qualifies as competition. The Vuelta last year. The Giro this year. At one point this spring they had won half the classics on the Women’s WorldTour calendar. Seven of fourteen. The best team in women’s cycling right now is not Dutch, not backed by a petrostate, not a global lifestyle brand with a cycling division. It is a French team, built in France, that started life with help from a theme park in the Vienne.

And this is what turns this from a nice story into an awkward question: look at the name on the jersey. FDJ. The French lottery money that has bankrolled the men’s team since 1997 sits behind the women’s team too. Same sponsor family, same country, same taxes, same employment law, same supposedly impossible conditions. One of these teams just won the biggest race in its sport. The other one spent July explaining itself.

So what did the women’s team do differently? Helpfully, their boss Stephen Delcourt has told us, in interviews, repeatedly, like a man leaving instructions in plain sight. They did not start by stacking up leaders. They started by structuring the team. Before they ever signed Vollering, they built the boring stuff: a proper sporting direction, a performance department, a medical department, even a marketing operation. Foundations first. Then, and only then, they went shopping, and when they went shopping they were not shy about it. Uttrup Ludwig. Cavalli. Grace Brown. And finally the biggest fish available, the best stage racer of her generation, brought into a structure that was already finished and waiting for her. The star was the last piece, not the first.

Now hold that up against the men’s operation and try not to wince. And look closer at who they signed, because the recruitment tells you everything about the culture. This is not a collection of the most expensive riders available. It’s a squad where every single signing answers a question. Riders like Juliette Berthet and Évita Muzic are GC riders in their own right, good enough to lead most teams, who accepted roles as mountain domestiques because the project was worth more than their own numbers. Franziska Koch won Paris-Roubaix this spring and spends July as the engine room. Élise Chabbey, the sort of rider who attacks races into pieces, took the climber’s jersey at the Tour and this year carries a leadership role of her own in the races that suit her. And underneath the internationals, a French spine runs through the whole thing: Marie Le Net, Muzic, the Tour de l’Avenir winner Églantine Rayer coming through, and twenty-year-old Célia Gery, the newly crowned French champion, given her Tour debut in the biggest race of the team’s life. They didn’t abandon the French identity to win. They built the winning around it.

And the hierarchy is public and unembarrassed. Before the Tour, the message from the team was one goal, yellow, and seven riders picked as a collective to deliver it, fresh from three weeks at altitude together. Everyone knew the plan, everyone knew their job, and nobody found out their fate from a morning phone call. Contrast that with the other side of the corridor, where this July the men’s team was leaving its long-time leader out of its Tour, to which he responded, publicly, that he couldn’t care less what his critics think. Another senior rider was dropped from the squad and went to the papers to say he didn’t understand the decision. By all accounts the mood in the building is somewhere below sea level. This is not a budget problem. You cannot blame UAE’s money for your own leaders learning their fate by phone and reading about the reasons in Le Télégramme. Dysfunction is free, and so is its opposite.

Let me be fair about the money, because the comparison isn’t perfectly clean and pretending otherwise would be cheap. Women’s cycling budgets are smaller in absolute terms, which means a determined French sponsor could make FDJ-Suez the biggest predator in that pond for a fraction of what it would cost to out-spend the Emiratis in the men’s game. Nobody is seriously suggesting the men’s team can just go and buy Pogacar, and the veterans of French management are not wrong that the arms race at the top of men’s cycling is brutal and getting worse. The average WorldTour budget is now north of thirty million euros a year and climbing.

But that is exactly why the women’s team is so instructive, because almost nothing on Delcourt’s list costs superteam money. Structure before stars. Clarity about who leads and why. Recruitment with a plan behind it rather than a press release. An environment good enough that the best rider in the world looked at a French team and saw the place her career should live, rather than a pay cut with nice light. Ambition, most of all. When FDJ-Suez decided to sign the best, nobody in that building said “we are a small French team.” They found a way. The way exists.

That, for me, is the real lesson, and it’s why the old excuse died in Nice on Sunday. “Small French team” was always two claims wearing one coat. The first claim, we cannot outspend the superteams, is true, and it will stay true. The second claim, therefore we cannot win the biggest races, has now been disproven at the highest level, in public, by the people down the corridor. What the women’s team showed is that the ceiling French cycling keeps pointing at is partly real and partly painted on. The paint is the part you can do something about.

And the beautiful, uncomfortable thing about a counterexample is that it doesn’t argue with you. It just sits there, wearing your own sponsor’s name, holding a yellow jersey.

French cycling has waited forty-one years for a home winner of its own race. It turns out one arrived this decade. She just wasn’t in the team everyone was watching.

The blueprint is in the same building. Someone should walk down the corridor and borrow it.