Two days, two wins. Tim Merlier (Soudal Quick-Step) came and pretty much smashed it to take his second straight sprint stage. Biniam Girmay (NSN Cycling Team) grabbed second place, also again, and Olav Kooij (Decathlon CMA CGM) rounded out the podium.

Breakaway hero Liam Slock (Lotto-Intermarché) gave it everything — in the break from the gun, then solo out front for the final 40km — only to get swallowed up by the bunch a heartbreaking 1.3km from the line

Not much to comment on with the finish, so let’s focus on the art of the long break instead. Hiding away in the peloton are riders who actively want to be up the road for six hours, riding at 95% without a break, who’ll happily trade a stage’s worth of suffering for one shot at glory, those guys who we see so often, trying day after day to be in the break.

Let’s cast back to 1991, and the longest successful break of the modern era: Thierry Marie in 1991.

The Longest

The 1991 Tour de France, Stage 6 and the 234km breakaway…

Race situation going into the stage: Rolf Sørensen of Ariostea had held the yellow jersey but crashed into a traffic island in stage 5, fracturing his clavicle. He finished that stage but couldn’t start stage six, so the race began without a yellow jersey at all. Greg Lemond, the defending champion, was the virtual leader on GC at that point, but LeMond declined to wear the jersey out of respect for Sørensen — a gesture in the tradition of Ocaña in 1971 and Hinault in 1980. Marie was 30th on GC at the start of the day, nowhere near a threat, which is exactly why nobody committed to chasing him.

The move itself: he went clear just 25km into the stage, and his own team’s second DS, Bernard Quilfen, ended up shepherding him from the car rather than Cyrille Guimard. Quilfen was renowned when he was a pro for undertaking this kind of mad mission himself, so he got the job of supporting Marie.

The lead swelled to 30 minutes at one point before the bunch woke up, but it was too late. He just kept opn powering into Le Havre, located in his native Normandy. He was alone for so long that he began singing songs to himself, to stave off the boredom! (See below).

He crossed the line in tears of exhaustion, barely able to raise his arms, 1’54” clear of the peloton. Marie’s cushion plus 32 seconds in bonuses gave him the overall lead by 1:04 over Sean Kelly, who’d jumped to second overall. Lemond dropped to third on GC and finished the stage itself down in 30th. Marie had to be propped up to do the interview at the finish.

His motivation to attack that day into Normandy?

Revenge!

Back in the 1986 Tour, Marie (riding for Systeme U under Guimard) had been on the verge of taking yellow through his own village in Normandy, in front of his family — until a rider named Jean-Claude Gaigne – his own teammate no less – beat him to it and got awarded the jersey instead. Marie never fully let that go, and Guimard, unhappy with Gaigne, let him go at the end of the season. The 1991 breakaway was, by his own account, revenge for that missed moment.

He nearly cracked in the closing kilometers though and had to be talked through it. As the bunch was closing at 45kph while he could only manage 30kph, Guimard was in his ear over the radio telling him to think about the yellow jersey. Marie’s own recollection: he didn’t care about that in the moment — he was solely fixated on the stage win itself, and only started grasping the scale of what he was doing as the finish got close.

Marie’s break was 234 km long, it lasted 6 hours 38 minutes at an average speed of 39 km/h.

Overall race result: Miguel Induráin won the 1991 Tour — his first of five straight titles, the start of the Induráin era. Lemond had a strong start and held yellow at points but cracked in the mountains and never really contended after that. Djamolidine Abdoujaparov won points, Claudio Chiappucci took the mountains jersey, and Álvaro Mejía won best young rider.

Marie didn’t carry Yellow much further, as he wasn’t built for the mountains, but wore yellow for seven days across his career.

Now that’s what you call a breakaway!

Across his career he won 5 prologues total (3 Tour, 1 Giro, 1 Vuelta) plus stage wins in all three Grand Tours, and rode 18 Grand Tours total — 12 Tours, 4 Giros, 2 Vueltas.

Marie was known and well-liked in the peloton for being jovial and sociable — except, by his own admission, on the morning of a prologue, when nobody was allowed to talk to him.

After retiring in 1996, at 33, Marie went back to his first love, landscaping, running a small one-man operation. He’s also kept riding — doing around 8,000km a year for fun.

Why Most Don’t Succeed

90% or so of the time, if not more, the peloton decides whether a breakaway survives, not the riders in it. A GC team with a sprinter to protect, or a team defending yellow will simply dictate the gap — two minutes, three minutes, whatever keeps the option to reel it in alive. The break isn’t racing for the stage until the bunch decides it’s allowed to.

The riders who we often see out there getting into breakaways have to be calculating, and have to have an appetite for defeat aligned with a ferocious desire for the win. They’re reading the same variables the peloton is: how many sprinters’ teams need this stage, how hot is it, how many days has this Tour had a real breakaway win already, how’s the wind looking, is it possibly downhill on the final run in, are there bends and roundabouts where they can stay out of sight of the chasers.

All of this is taken into account, and for many of the breakaway specialists, they will have pinpointed the stages in the first few days that the routed for the tour is released.

Attack in enough stages, in enough configurations, and eventually the exact cocktail of fatigue, disinterest, and stage profile lines up in your favour. It might take 5, 10 or even more attempts across a career to get one that sticks.

Modern racing makes this almost impossible to repeat a feat like Marie’s. Radios mean directeurs sportifs know the gap to the second and can calibrate the chase with total precision. Power data means teams know exactly what wattage is sustainable to close it down. The romantic, half-blind guesswork that let Marie’s gap balloon to 30 minutes before anyone panicked simply doesn’t happen anymore.

And yet the instinct hasn’t died. Every Tour still has its serial escapees, throwing themselves up the road stage after stage, absorbing the disappointment of being caught inside the final kilometre, and coming back the next morning to do it again. Liam Slock did exactly that into Bergerac — 40km alone before the bunch swallowed him with 1.3km to go.

Cruel, but not wasted. That’s a rider building his name, getting his sponsors’ logos on TV. You also get strong as heck after doing two or three of these, as well as gaining invaluable knowledge that might – just might, one day – lead to success!