Cycling-France’s Bouchard out of Tour de France with COVID-19

DOLE, France (Reuters) – Geoffrey Bouchard became the first Tour de France rider to pull out of the race with COVID-19, his AG2R-Citroen team said on Saturday.

“During the (seventh) stage (on Friday) I did not feel well. It’s a huge disappointment because we were juts getting to my favourite terrain, the mountains,” Bouchard said in a team statement.

Bouchard, 30, won the mountains classification at the 2019 Tour if Spain and in last year’s Giro d’Italia.

AG2R-Citroen said that the rest of the squad, from which Bouchard was isolated, was negative for COVID-19.

(This story corrects age to 30, not 27, in paragraph three)

(Reporting by Julien Pretot; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)