Road captains, the Tour de France’s cool, calm customers

BORDEAUX – While Tour de France contenders battle to gain time on their rivals, sprinters seek stage wins and breakaway specialists sniff out opportunities, road captains are keeping an eye on everyone.

Every team have one but their role is not always obvious, either for fans watching along the side of the road or for those glued to their TV sets.

The road captains, the riders who exude “calmness” and “selflessness”, are the ones who organise their teammates, protect their team leaders and act as the squad’s brains on the road.

One of the most experienced road captains on the Tour is Australian Luke Durbridge of Jayco-AlUla.

“I think experience, knowledge, just selflessness. He’s just in there for the team,” said his sports director Mathew Hayman, who was victorious at the Paris-Roubaix race in 2016.

Durbridge, 35, is one of the older statesmen on the Tour, riding the Grand Boucle for the 12th time in 2026.

One of his strengths is “to be able to have a level of calmness in a hectic situation”, added Hayman.

“To call a spade a spade as well... If we’re doing a debrief about what happened, he’s honest.”

Durbridge’s willingness to sacrifice and race nous were in evidence during the mountainous third stage to Les Angles, where he was dropped on a climb but battled back to join the lead group, and then still had the presence of mind to look after his teammates.

“He came back with a second group, got bottles from the cars, gave them to Plappi (Luke Plapp) and Mauro (Schmid) and within 3km, they’re in a breakaway,” recalled Hayman about a scorching hot day in the saddle when temperatures reached 40 deg C.

“If they didn’t have those bottles of water, they wouldn’t have been in the breakaway. So, that’s the race head. He’s thinking next step. He’s always thinking about the others.”

French teenage prodigy Paul Seixas spoke about his Decathlon CMA CGM road captain Tiesj Benoot before the Tour began, stressing how important the Belgian’s role would be.

“He’s already experienced one of his leaders winning a Grand Tour,” said the 19-year-old.

“That experience counts for a lot in a Grand Tour over three weeks, to make the right effort in the right moments and to be managed well by him in the team.”

Benoot was the road captain at Visma-Lease a Bike when Jonas Vingegaard won the Tour.

Road captains might have to bypass their own ambitions to challenge for a stage win to instead look after the interests of the team, in particular their leader.

“I’m happy to do it,” Benoot said in January at a training camp in Spain.

“With Jonas, the objective was crystal clear: I did not even think about getting into a breakaway, I was very proud of my role. When you’re the teammate (of a contender) in cycling, the biggest victory that you can have is winning the Tour de France.

“My strength is being calm when the others are stressing – that helps me to make good decisions. A road captain needs peripheral vision. You have to make decisions quickly because the sports director in the team cars sometimes don’t have the images or they get them later. When they take a decision, it’s too late.” AFP