dpThe Tour de France starts while much of the sporting world’s focus is on the Fifa World Cup.
Sixteen years have passed since Andres Iniesta, then a midfield maestro for Barcelona, scored the goal that gave Spain their first World Cup title.
Now he presides over the NSN Cycling team, who contest their first Tour de France and start their mission in the city where Iniesta has legendary status.
Iniesta has one of the best riders in sprinter Girmay, but he also must deal with the headache of trying to run a cycling team which still has none of the free-market TV rights cashflow of the sport in which he made his name.
“Once you get to see the sport from the inside, it’s absolutely fascinating,” Iniesta told a pre-race news conference. “From the outside, you mostly see the riders, but you don’t see all the strategy and hard work that goes on behind the scenes. That’s what surprised me the most.
“We’ve tried to create values for our team. I think fans can love our team because we are trying to make something special.”
New ways to monetise cycling so that teams do not have to rely solely on sponsors continue to be discussed.
So too does the sport’s attempt to keep doping out of cycling.
The International Testing Agency is carrying out a feasibility study into using power data as part of its anti-doping strategy.
The Swiss group, in charge of anti-doping for cycling’s world governing body the UCI, is working with five teams to gather data with the aim of supporting more traditional methods of blood and urine analysis through the athlete biological passport.
There is some scepticism within cycling about whether such an approach will be of any additional benefit to a sport which has not had a major doping controversy for more than five years.
But while lower-level riders are still being caught and the average speeds in the big races are creeping up, the issue never entirely goes away while cycling, hurt by past scandals, looks to build and maintain a clean image.
