Romain Bardet will return to the Tour de France in 2023. Of course, he competed in the Tour de France last year and again in 2020, but you have to go back to 2019 to find his heart leaning toward the Tour de France. This year, he returns refreshed, focused, and "empty" on his home roads.

But he is also pragmatic: runner-up in 2016 and on the podium again in 2017, Bardet was once the biggest threat of the Chris Froome era and the long-awaited local Tour winner to succeed Bernard Inaud.

Things have changed dramatically in the interim. Now 32 years old, Bardet has settled into the rhythm of Team DSM and says he is better than ever. The problem is that the competition has evolved even further.

"It has changed a lot. They are faster. Everyone is getting stronger," Bardet said at a press conference this week.

"When it used to be Team Sky, they were certainly super strong, and I wouldn't say that Sky in 2016 and 2017 was weaker than Jumbo Visma is now, but now we have not only Jumbo, but UAE, Ineos, etc. We have more density at the top

"We also have super talents like Tadei Pogachar, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenpole. When [Bradley] Wiggins won the Tour, when Froome won the Tour, they really relied on their team to succeed.

Bardet dismissed the notion that his form has regressed since his Tour de France podium. "It's definitely getting better," he said.

That said, his ambitions at the Tour have changed. At the top of his priority list is a stage win, his first since 2017. After that, it's "to get the best possible GC result," but he knows that's hard to show in numbers.

He wants to do the "Tour de France à la Geraint Thomas," albeit a somewhat surprising and disproportionately poetic comparison.

Whereas Vingegaard and Pogachar beat each other last summer, sprinting away as if at will with the rest of the field already in the red, Thomas hung on to his task and "outclassed" the rest, the winner of the 2018 Tour, the subject of numerous internet memes, but also of praise from his professional peers.

"I think his performance was great," Bardet said Tuesday. 'He was very fit, very toned, focused on his race, doing his best every day. For a rider who has already won the Tour, he was really fighting when the other two were running away and being dropped every time. It was a truly inspiring performance.

"You have to admit that cycling has gotten faster. You also have to pick and find your own references in your performance. It's not just about winning, but about doing your best and seeing what the end result is. He showed that even at 36 he can do his best. For me, he was even better than when he won the Tour.

During his time with the AG2R team, Bardet's season was defined by the Tour, and the pressure was such that he needed to get out of this cycle. He eventually made the move to the 2020 Giro d'Italia, but due to a pandemic, he had to wait until 2021 to make his Italian Grand Tour debut.

Last year he returned with the Giro as his goal, but was forced to abandon the race due to illness, despite showing promise as a podium contender. He came to the Tour with high expectations, but despite a couple of days of crashes, he finished 7th overall (upgraded to 6th due to Nairo Quintana's disqualification).

While the Giro is a 70km time trial, the Tour is 22km and mountainous, making Grand Tour planning for pure climbers easier than ever, Bardet suggested that he is fully prepared to try the Tour again.

"I don't think I have lost my love for the Tour. I am grateful for everything I have learned from all my experiences at the Tour, the good and the bad. There are more positives than negatives, but 2019 wasn't good and 2020 was a crash. Every year we did the same thing over and over again. I needed to find a new focus and find myself in a different way

"I go into the Tour now with the same feeling I had last year in the Giro. It's the mentality I've learned with this team. I'm concentrating on the process, not the consequences that a bad result can have on your life."

Bardet is understandably disheartened that what was once a central goal of his career has risen to a level of competition that is virtually beyond his reach. But even if he has no real desire to continue racing beyond 2024, he appears to be energized by the situation he finds himself in.

"My thinking has changed a little bit. But now it's clear that when I go into a race like the Tour, I'm not going to be the best rider or one of the two or three or four leading riders. So I keep pushing, in terms of tactics and training, to raise my level so that I can be competitive with the younger guys."

"It's becoming a bit of a game. I know that if I go for a summit finish with the guys who have won the recent Grand Tours, I'm going to lose on paper. We need to find another way to make time. It's interesting."

"It's very difficult to be a competitor of Vingegaard and Pogachar. There is uncertainty. Given the route and its difficulty, being a second tier outsider could make things exciting.

"Even if you've been there before, being on the podium is a huge accomplishment, and we know that running the same race as in 2017 won't do it, because it's not the same race, it's not the same race. So I started thinking about a different path. Even if I'm at 100% physically, that's not good enough right now compared to 2016 and 2017. Given the competition, we need something different."