Jonas Vingegaard Made It Out Alive, Then Made Barcelona Smile

BARCELONA — “Every swarm needs a face,” declares the post announcing Visma-Lease a Bike’s new bee mascot, “and every face needs a name.” Confusing proclamations aside—the defining characteristic of a swarm is its facelessness—the opening stage of the 2026 Tour de France was one for the insects. As if to bless Visma for their honeycomb jerseys out of an oblique entomic solidarity, the swarm of cicadas nestled in the scrubby pines atop Montjuïc thrummed Jonas Vingegaard to victory on Saturday’s Stage 1. The lanky Dane smashed the Côte du Stade Olympique to win a team time trial somewhat worthy of the name and don the yellow jersey for the first time in three years. The Tour is here, and it’s off to the most fascinating possible start.

The strangest thing about the Tour starting in Barcelona has nothing to do with the city’s Spanishness but rather its size. The Tour is the biggest deal in almost every town, village, and city it graces, but Barcelona, like Paris, is big enough to have a city’s worth of people with other stuff going on. You’d have little idea the world’s biggest bike race was about to come to town for three days if you’d walked around and checked the vibes in Eixample, Ciutat Vella, or any of the other touristy parts of town on Friday. If pressed to say what major world sporting event was about to happen and you’d done the necessary walking around, you might say an Argentina World Cup watch party. Anyone stepping foot into the KFC whose doors open up as if in enfilade out onto the Sagrada Familia is not going be bothered to put down a drumstick and walk up Montjuïc in the heat of the day. The toasted gaggles I saw out still flickering past 7 a.m. the next day aren’t concerning themselves with such a morning sport.

But the cicadas know. The Tour opened with a fascinating experiment, and an equally swarming Barcelona crowd greeted the race with enthusiasm, bravado, and bright-pink faces, thanks to event security’s confounding decision to take people’s bottles of sunscreen at the start zone. I spent a chunk of the sweltering afternoon positioned about halfway up the final climb, thronged by fans, including, rather puzzlingly, a venerable old Dutch guy wearing an orange (?) Red Sox hat (??) sitting regally in a full-cushion armchair (???). Did he haul it up the mountain? Repurpose it from some local scrap heap? A nearby man helpfully pointed out that he was a big-shot sponsor, before proudly telling us that his son Tim Marsman was riding his first Tour in support of Mathieu van der Poel. Exclusionary VIP experiences are an inextricable part of the Tour, so I appreciate that even while this man was perched in a cushy, well-upholstered chair, he was doing so among the people.