The green jersey usually isn’t won by someone staying in front consistently. It’s won by the actual sprinters, whose teams do the pace-setting on the flat stages to chase down the breakaways, allowing their star sprinters to fight it out to the finish line in what’s called a “field sprint.” After the first week, there are very few sprint points as the race goes into the mountains, and even the finishing line sprint points don’t matter because *none* of the fast guys can hang with the climbers for long enough to cross in the first 10 positions.

The second basic strategy is really a corollary of the first. Since larger groups are able to take turns drafting, they have a greater chance of success breaking away. A one man breakaway is very uncommon, and usually only happens on the mountain stages where aerodynamics aren’t as important.

Another core factor is the incredibly dangerous first week. This year’s Tour highlighted just about every way the first week can be treacherous. Since the first week is always fairly flat, the stages usually end in a peloton finish, as the sprinters’ teams chase down the breakaways. As a result, the times in the General Classification are very close, and it’s possible for anyone to wear the yellow by simply having a good day. Since the peloton is so fast in this first week, crashes are frequent — and sometimes the crashes are even caused by people jostling around to get to the front in order to avoid crashes, like what happened leading to the narrow cobblestone streets a week ago. This year had a lot of big crashes, and major contenders were taken out of the race due to bad luck in where they were positioned. All of this leads to a lot of tension between riders and even more jostling for position.

One more tactic that USPS used flawlessly was in giving away the yellow jersey. Lance rode in yellow after his team dominated the TTT, but they didn’t want to bear the burden of riding in front all the time and chasing down breakaways to keep in yellow. Instead, they allowed a large breakaway with more or less unimportant riders to cross the line more than 10 minutes ahead of the peloton, thus ensuring that the lead rider in the breakaway would wear yellow until they reached the mountains.

I know you know all this, but I thought some of these little points might benefit the audience. Hope I didn’t spoil anything you were going to talk about next time.