Team Wednesday limp home on their own leaving day

21.3 km/h. That is the number that will sit next to Team Wednesday’s name for the rest of this Tour, the slowest ride out they have managed in four attempts, and it arrived on the very day the defending champions had nothing left to defend but pride. Iain, racing for Team Wednesday, went out into a passing shower and a southerly breeze gusting into his face at 18 km/h, and every metre of the road seemed to know it.

The damage was worst where it always shows first: out on Byker Bridge, with nothing to hide behind and the crosswind doing exactly what it likes on that exposed deck. Byker Bridge West was the slowest of twenty attempts, dead last, 100% off the best time ever recorded there. Moments later the Bus Lane Sprint segment fell the same way, another slowest-of-twenty, another day added to the ledger rather than taken off it. Two segments, back to back, both career-worst efforts on a bridge that has never been kind to a rider fighting the wind.

Away from the numbers there was at least the usual theatre of the crossing: the tyre note changing as the bus lane gave way to the cycle path, gulls wheeling over a river doing its own thing far below, the shower blowing itself out somewhere over the Ouseburn. None of it slowed the slide.

In the general classification, Team Wednesday still sit second, but the gap to leaders Team Friday has swollen from 86 seconds per 10 km to 109, and Team Thursday are breathing down their necks just eight seconds further back. This was Team Wednesday’s last outing of the Tour bar the ride home, and it is a strange way for the champions of August to bow out — not with a flourish, but with their slowest ride of the whole campaign, on the bridge that has never once let them off lightly.