David Gaudu is a Twitch streamer now
David Gaudu is a Twitch streamer now
How did David Gaudu celebrate finishing fourth at the recent Tour de France? By live-streaming himself to 36,000 people on Twitch for 2 hours and 48 minutes to explain how he managed to be the best of the rest outside the podium places.
Twitch, for those with real, adult lives, is basically like YouTube but the video is a live broadcast of whatever your camera or webcam is being pointed at. Mostly, Twitch is the enclave of people playing video games and people watching them do so, while other streamers simply chat to their audience, some DJ, while others paint in what must be one of the most relaxing ways to spend time on the internet.
But back to David Gaudu. More specifically, his Twitch channel.
Many riders, directly after finishing the Tour de France, would whisk themselves off for a relaxing holiday with their loved ones. But seemingly not David Gaudu.
Seven days after arriving in Paris he sat in his gaming chair in front of a microphone for nearly three hours going through the past three weeks of racing in exquisite detail.
If there was ever a time I wish I’d paid more attention in French class, it’s now. Purely based on this one translated tidbit from the broadcast, of which there are surely many more.
At one point, the 25-year-old tells the story of how, during the 2022 Tour, one of Tadej Pogačar’s attacks on a non-mountain day came about because Peter Sagan had ridden up alongside the yellow jersey Jonas Vingegaard and told the Dane that Pogačar didn’t have the balls to attack. Pogačar, naturally, responded.
This Tour review was Gaudu’s third stream, the first two being broadcasts of him playing the Tour de France video game, Grand Boucle, and ProCyclingManager.
In the Tour de France stream, he plays a three-stage Grand Boucle formed of a mountain-top finish at Alpe d’Huez to kick things off, then the Roubaix stage, and a final battle atop the Col du Granon to decide the winner. Let’s hope ASO tuned in. After taking yellow on Alpe d’Huez, Gaudu loses yellow to Pogačar on the cobbles and finishes second overall, but helps Thibaut Pinot pick up the polka dot jersey. A successful three-day Tour for Groupama-FDJ.
Then, in the ProCyclingManager video, Gaudu begins a WorldTour season with Groupama-FDJ, never picking himself in the team’s squad such is his humility, before managing to finish Etoile de Bessèges with riders stacked from 3rd to 6th in the overall classification. In three swift hours, Gaudu has managed to turn Groupama-FDJ into some sort of French Movistar.
So there we have it, the weird and wonderful world of David Gaudu, the internet personality.
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