Sport's erratum: Why you should watch the Tour de France
Professional road cycling’s annual July popularisation is an underdog’s beautiful triumph. It is, by its lengthened gradual nature, unabashedly at odds with contemporary culture’s love of want-now, get-now whizzpopping immediacy. It’s unsurprising that a sport which elongates itself over hazy afternoons cannot entice the same baying multitudes that football, rugby and fop-laden Tennis can at similar times of year. In the sporting hierarchy, road cycling pins about as many eyeballs to its doings as Japanese basketball, Kenyan ice hockey and Austrian surfing. And why should the world’s restive attention linger? It is sport’s erratum. Its spindly practitioners chug along, their kits bonded to their bodies with the fixity of a grape’s skin. These pedallers cannot compete in the photogenic games with footballers and F1 drivers. The latter paddock has the most auspicious and loin-firing DNA; the sons of the adored stars and over-leveraged swindlers. Cyclists look like supranormal extra-planetary enforcers - all appreciable body mass and articulacy stripped from them - here to meddle with Earth’s tractable anthropoids.
When they’re not lining up buttock to buttock on a start line, the press ridicules their downgraded metropolitan peers. The pizza delivery boys and Warfarin widows freewheeling from A to B on traditionally framed steel are apparent threats to highway safety. What goonish figures these commuters cut. Tardy middle management and business mules rocking up ten minutes late for the penthouse meeting, their legs tattooed with oily mishaps, their hair splayed through altered velocity, their tummies soddened with the dabs of degenerate exertion. Survey after survey shows a globally pervasive puzzlement at these practices, and an incalculable detestation of those throwing a leg over.
Even if these prejudices can be obviated, a similarly harmful presumption of elite malfeasance lives on. Lance Armstrong, Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis (of course it was the acquisitive yanks) have done more to incriminate professional road cycling than the more blatant, banal and therefore lovable cheats who boarded trains and hitched lifts from private citizens in the earlier 20th century. If cycling isn’t boring, and it’s not partaken by maddened pariahs, then it’s full of smirking miscreants who defraud the taxpayer out of millions, leaping to the podium with criminally viscous blood and infuriating impunity.
Its lesser-spotted advocates like myself are not helped by the fire to this public smoke. Not every six hour perambulation of a Spanish island is gripping theatre, not every paid rider has a merchandisable flair, and not every win can be celebrated with the calm satisfaction of a drugless sport. But I’m going to stick up for these blinkered cretins sequestered atop Mount Teide for months at a time. With the same phonic charm, backseat humour and clinical realism for which I’m paid, I’ll get you watching the Tour de France.
Cycling is a composite. It has the gruesome corporeal bloodiness of cage fighting, the technological savviness of space exploration, the field size of a monotheistic pilgrimage, the geographical capacity of a Taylor Swift tour and the Carlton Club’s constitutionalised clauses of gentlemanly respect. It also does not kid the viewer with fabulations of coy democracy; only half a dozen or so riders come to the Tour wanting to place in the top three and, in 2024, there start only two riders whom pundits and quibblers feel have a veritable chance of winning. So lets desist from any quixotic script-writing from the start. There’ll be no ill-equipped waif quietly clipping off to avenge the tragedies of his native land. If such a nobody does come and win the Tour, then we’ll know for certain he’s doping.
The favourite is Tadej Pogacar (pronounced “Tad-day Pog-ach-ar”) whose merciless glory must have permeated the popular consciousness by now. Having won nearly everything of note at age 26, he’s become redolent of the “cannibal” Eddy Merckx. Never has there been noticeable such an amusing antithesis between a rider’s in-race greed, and their mellow pleasantries off the bike. Tadej spends most Sunday afternoons rounding up cycling’s trophies with autocratic unscrupulousness, before humouring the media with his naivete. The Giro d’Italia took place over three weeks in May, and was completely massacred by Tadej and his UAE Emirates team. Sterner competition might prevent him from riding off into the sunset in July, but the bookmakers can’t see anyone topping him on current form.
Returning for a tilt at a Tour de France hat-trick is the former fishmonger Jonas Vingegaard (pronounced “Yoe-nas Vin-ner-goo”). His landslide victory last year put Pogacar in his mirrors by an indecent margin of five minutes. Had Jonas breezed through warm-up races and altitude camps, he’d be the favourite. A biblically injurious crash at the Tour of the Basque Country a few months ago set his preparation back weeks. Considering the sensitivity of these riders' protocols (two missed sessions can see you flunk the standard by 5%) Jonas can’t be expected to fly. There remains a tantalising ignorance around his shape. His residual ability might see him ride his way into the Tour, cling on in the early stages, and hope to reach some semblance of maximal fitness when it matters in week three.
Of the piteous unfortunates wheeling around France in July, Primoz Roglic (pronounced “Pree-moz Rog-lich”) has the justest cause to whine. Collapses on penultimate days, eye-narrowing crashes and other avoidable disasters have engendered a charming, ungainly, Victorian stoicism in him. If, heaven forbid, his entire extended family were to flail to their demise aboard an airliner on Tuesday, and he himself were to be captured by amputating militants on Wednesday he’d be ready to race the Tour de France on Thursday. In an era of protean flimsiness, Roglic has an endearing, bullish irascibility. 2020 saw him lose the Tour on stage 20 to a metamorphosing Tadej Pogacar, and pile-ups have hindered his chances ever since. Roglic has a realistic chance of a podium and his victory would be a shock, but don’t count out this resilient desert rat when everyone’s resources run thin.
The final racer with a sane aim of victory is wunderkind Remco Evenepoel (pronounced “Rem-coe Eve-ner-pool”). The impetuosity of youth, and the delicacy of doted-on success have left Remco’s head. He stormed through the youth ranks, booting a professional football career over the sidelines, and grasped the high-hung fruit upon entrance. His Quickstep Alpha Vinyl team lacks the depth of support necessary to mount a probable Tour challenge, but there’s never been a more adept freelancer or talented grand tour autodidact in whom the Belgians can place their changeable faith. If his dummy stays within his mouth and his boss Patrick Lefevere’s comments can stay inside his own head, Remco could easily round out the top three.
There are a few similarities - or shall we say helpful prerequisites - shared between the cyclist’s life and this ‘spooky art’ of writing. Cyclists and writers both: feel most alive when alone, repurpose a molten drive in a calm medium, receive paltry credit for perseverance, pride themselves on an incongruousness, embrace and feed on the tepid favour of those closest, depend on backstreet pharmacology, and stink of caffeinated gloop. Every year the Tour de France makes 20 of its 160 odd entrants into hailed phenoms. For every tire it pops, every clavicle it snaps, and every resolution it upends, the Tour de France rewards a tricky few for their caution and subservience to Mother Cycling. It cannot possibly face down all this century’s gagging, needful, short-termism, but it gives such a worthy vendetta a damn good go and lends us chalky strays some time in the sun. I love it. And you should too.