FILE PHOTO: Cycling - Giro d'Italia - Stage 12 - Siena to Bagno di Romagna, Italy - May 20, 2021 AG2R Citroen Team rider Geoffrey Bouchard of France finishes stage 12 REUTERS/Jennifer Lorenzini
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)
