Egan Bernal says Tour de France postponement would be best option

Tour de France champion Egan Bernal has said that he has taken a break from training and is putting his feet up during the coronavirus lockdown at his home in Colombia, adding that he believes it would be best for the 2020 Tour to be postponed in the wake of the pandemic.

In an article on Ciclo21 (opens in new tab) Bernal said: “Right now I am not training, neither mentally nor physically. I had been training hard for Paris-Nice (opens in new tab), then I got on my rollers as soon as I arrived in Colombia. But with the coach we planned that the best thing to do was rest fully"

“We still have 15 days until April 13 (lockdown deadline in Colombia). We prefer to work five or six days, then start riding. You don't lose what you did since December taking a break, doing one or two hours on rollers and then going out on the roads, ” he continued.

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The 23-year-old hasn't raced since the final stage of the Tour Colombia 2.1 (opens in new tab) on February 16, so he would be almost starting completely fresh whenever the season re-starts, if it does at all.

The lockdown across much of the globe has had a catastrophic affect on the cycling calendar, seeing races like the Giro d'Italia (opens in new tab) getting postponed and the Tour de France seemingly going to same way.

"This lockdown affects us all, even for the Tour if it is done in July, because some favourites may fail, the preparation is different. It is better that it could have been postponed," Bernal said.

“For cycling, if we don't run the big three [Grand Tours] it will be very serious, it will depend on how this evolves. What is clear is that the world must go on. This cannot block the world, life in general.

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"For the sake of cycling, for sponsors who invest a lot of money and are being affected by this quarantine, I hope they are carried out.”

Those following the Ineos climber on Instagram will see that he is spending a lot of his time watching TV and asking people to stay at home during this crisis, adding that he is not thinking about cycling.

“I'm a little disconnected from cycling, I haven't seen much news," Bernal said. "Right now it's just speculation, I don't want to kill my head for something that is still not certain. I haven't seen what a crowdless Tour would look like.”