The riders had finished.
Her day continued.

A soigneur stands by the road with musettes, at the finish with bottles and at the hotel with massage oil. Between those three places lies a working day that spectators rarely see.

Before the peloton arrives

On 23 July 2015, the Tour's 18th stage ran from Gap to Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne. While the riders prepared for 186.5 kilometres and seven classified climbs, Christine Lueber's day began with what had to be ready: drinks, rice cakes, musettes and dry jerseys.

She worked for Trek Factory Racing and had been a soigneur for more than fifteen years. The word suggests care, but the job covered much more than massage. A bottle in the right place and a hotel room near the right rider were also forms of treatment.

A different road through the Alps

Lueber did not always follow the race route. Cars without the necessary accreditation had to go around the caravan. From Gap to the next hotel at Le Corbier, that meant a detour of about 200 kilometres over the Col de Montgenèvre, into Italy and back through the Fréjus tunnel.

On the course, Romain Bardet won the stage. At the hotel, Lueber checked the room allocation. The soigneurs needed to be close to their riders so tired legs did not have to search the corridors for the massage table.

Fabian had gone home

For many years, Lueber had special responsibility for Fabian Cancellara. At the 2015 Tour he was wearing the yellow jersey when a mass crash on stage three fractured two vertebrae. He withdrew that evening.

So on this evening she had only one rider to massage instead of the usual two. A treatment took about an hour. Her hands did not follow a fixed recipe; they searched for that day's tension in thighs, back and neck. The laundry still waited. The team's kit had to be washed, dried and ready again.

The invisible stage

The Tour measured Bardet's winning margin and Chris Froome's overall time. It did not count the musettes Lueber packed, the kilometres she drove or the hours at the massage table. Her stage ended only when the riders could begin the next one.

That may be the simplest explanation of the people behind a bicycle race: they do not win at the finish line. They make it possible for others to start again the next morning.