J’aime le Tour - New English Review

by Bill Corden (August 2019)

Tour de France, Versailles, Leroy Neiman, 1964

Tour de France, television’s best show of the year, every year, in July.

The show now takes us all on a magnificent tour of la belle France while covering the race in incroyable detail and every stage is a battle for your senses, and I mean all of them.

First of all is the colour—the the bikes, the team strip, the bunting, every day a kaleidoscope as these superhuman athletes congregate for the Start each morning. The atmosphere tingling with excitement and anticipation, in a part of the world where professional cyclists are like Rock Gods.

In North America, they could walk in just about any city unmolested.

grinta, architecture, politics, skulduggery and triumph over adversity. Back in the early 1960s, one of the riders was quoted as saying, “It isn’t possible to finish the Tour de France without drugs. Even with drugs, it is still the severest endurance test of any athletic pursuit.”

The Tour has visited most of the neighbouring European countries with the travelling road show and wherever they go, the event is greeted with goodwill and gratitude for the honour of hosting a stage. It’s always teeming with spectators.

With over 150 riders, their equipment and their support people, they somehow manage to get everyone to the start line every morning. The media train that follows them around is in lockstep with the entire procession. On every stage the route is lined with fans, almost from start to finish.

You have to know something about French culture to understand but, in broad terms, the entire country takes July and August off as vacation!

The media train has developed into a phenomenal technical marvel. They have guys on motorbikes with a cameraman on the pillion seat giving us absolutely fabulous close up images of riders blowing along at 50 mph—and of crashes, blood-soaked jerseys, skinned legs and shoulders, bikes smashed to pieces in crashes and yet the show rolls on. These motorbike riders and camera men are in constant danger themselves and yet they never seem to back off from giving us just what we want.

Phil Liggett and the too-soon departed Paul Sherwen polished the commentaries to a fine art, to the point where you enjoy the history as much as the race.

Then we have the river valleys: the beautiful, vast, wooded areas that surprise us with their ubiquity, the endless vineyards, the unbelievably fertile farmlands and the subtropical south coast. On top of that, they have ski resorts, waterfalls, mountain lakes and have even drilled a tunnel through Mont Blanc! Is there another country in the world blessed with such diverse topography in such a compact space?

All of this we learn as the riders are barrelling along, plotting and scheming against one another for victory in much the same way Cardinal Richelieu did in the days when a lot of these monuments were first erected!

I mentioned the motorbike cameramen earlier and cited their bravery but none can match the bravery of the team mechanics. Anyone who has watched the tour on TV will have seen them hanging out of the team car doing about 40 miles per hour while adjusting some malfunction on the gears of a bike. All of them have to have complete confidence in eachother: the riders, the drivers and mechanics because one tiny mistake and everybody’s in hospital!

How can history and this monumental human effort come together so easily and capture the interest of not only France, but of the world at large?

Well, as you look at the storied architecture and the struggles that were overcome to get chateaus or bridges built over 500 years ago, or aqueducts that were built before any sort of power tools were invented, you start to realise that the race in itself is an allegory for the running of society. Human capabilities, persistence and frailties on display at every level.

Each day we see well planned policies fall apart. Each and every day there are accidents, fractious individuals within teams, sneak attacks and false stories.

And then, after a day long campaign where everyone has worked to their limit, the winner across the line quite often is only separated by a hair’s breadth from the loser, just like some referendum results.

The redeeming nature though, is the way the absolute favourites come through on the gruelling climbs, The Ventoux, The Alpe d’Huez, The Galibier, these are the places where the cold hard steel of heroes are forged.

Drugs be damned! They’re all on something, so it’s always mano-a-mano and it’s always a matter of who cracks first! Such exciting stuff!

Victory belongs, in that allegorical sense, to survival of the fittest and smartest and the ones who make best use of their resources, just like life itself.

The engineers and architects from the 14th century, must have been met with similar skepticism. Yet they forged ahead and built chateaus on mountain summits or achingly beautiful cathedrals on river islands with only self-propelled power which, to close the circle, is the only thing that the Tour de France riders have at their disposal.

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Bill Corden is a happily retired sports columnist living in Vancouver, British Columbia. Now he writes, plays music and makes people laugh.

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