By Christopher Cudworth

Peter Sagan defying the seriousness of the Tour de France.

While being interviewed about his experience thus far in the Tour de France, rider Chris Horner of the Omega Pharma Quickstep team admitted that their pre-race meeting before a stage with 5 difficult climbs turned into a confessional of sorts. “We don’t know what’s going to happen,” he told his team.

For all the planning that goes into the team dynamics and individual performance in the Tour de France, there appears to be a clear dynamic that riders and their managers cannot control. That is, anything can happen, and often does.

Rider Matthew Busche is in his first Tour de France and has hit the deck in crashes no less than 5 times. Yet he’s resolute, and when the opportunity came around, he jumped into a breakaway that lasted dozens of miles before being caught by the peloton.

Such attempts seem fruitless until you see a rider like Tony Martin take it out like a solo train engine and ride to the finished untouched. Sure, he’s an anomaly. A world champion time trialist. But all those riders in the Tour are amazing. On a given day, and given some good legs, people can ride free and grab a stage.

It all depends on luck. And the weather. And the strange algebra of team politics and General Category desires.

It’s every man for himself except when the Podium Girls dole out those little kisses to the category victors.

It’s just stunning how, in the world’s biggest cycling event, it turns out to be every man for himself. Even Chris Froome was not safe from crashing out. And he won last year. Nor Alberto Contador, whose bike dissolved beneath him somehow. Even world class riders have the same problems as some of us hackers. Remember Andy Schleck with his slipped chain a few years back? It cost him 39 seconds or so. Enough to lose the Tour by that exact amount to Contador.

Again and again this year it has become evident that the best-laid plans of every team can be dashed in a second. Hearing Busche interviewed one realizes that most of these guys, while having a plan set out by the team, are pretty much freelancing out there on the road. That’s because you can’t predict what’s going to happen with 180 guys flying down narrow, wet roads at 30 miles per hour.

Seeing these guys wrecked and exhausted, almost too tired to speak to the media after each stage, is both humbling and inspiring. When TJ VanGarderen was asked what his plans were going into the Rest Day, he said, “I just want to get to the Rest Day.”

They’re human. And yet they’re not.

But when Peter Sagan rides a wheelie over the finish line on an 11% grade at the end of a long, hard stage it makes you realize that for all the manic danger, these are still guys riding their bikes for love and money and pride.

It’s every man for himself. And then some.