In just over a week, on the day of the Wimbledon ladies final, or if you prefer, which I do, the third test between the Lions and the Springboks in Johannesburg, 180-odd riders in the heart of Monaco will set off at intervals for the opening time-trial stage of the Tour de France. It will be a magic moment in the late-afternoon Mediterranean heat when the greatest sporting event in the world starts to roll out again.
But why do we love it? Though we know that everyone is probably on drugs, why does it still retain that epic grandeur? The other day Bernhard Kohl of Austria, the disgraced rider who finished third in last year’s tour before testing positive for EPO, gave a devastating interview to L’Equipe. ‘I don’t want to continue leading a double life which is based on lies,’ he said (ahem). Earlier he admitted using outlawed doping products and methods for most of his career. ‘Without doping there is no equal opportunity in the top international field,’ Kohl said. ‘This is absolutely the end. I have voluntarily doped — in a system in which you can’t win without doping. Talent, training and iron discipline just aren’t enough at some point. Doping becomes the rule. A clean sport is unfortunately an exception.’
Bernhard’s spot on, of course. Hardly a year seems to go by without a Tour being blighted by a doping scandal, yet the return of the greatest spectacle in the sporting year never fails to stir the soul. This is endeavour on an epic scale — a 3,500 km bike ride over 23 days that makes demands on the body and the mind that dwarf most other sporting challenges.
This year’s Tour is the most intriguing for years thanks to the return to the fray of the seven-times winner Lance Armstrong. The 37-year-old Texan has had his ups and downs — besides surviving cancer, he did the dirty to the lovely Sheryl Crowe, though he bounced back with a jolly good performance as himself in that major classic Dodgeball.
He should be a hero the world over, yet in the land of his greatest triumphs he remains a highly contentious figure. The French never took to Armstrong — in their eyes he was chippy, graceless and too much of a machine to engage their emotions. He could speak the language but often chose not to, and for this particular foreigner to dominate this celebration of all things French only brought home to them their continued failure to produce a genuine Tour challenger of their own.
No Frenchman has won the Tour since Bernard Hinault took the last of his five titles in 1985, and there’s no prospect of a home-grown winner in the forseeable future. And the rosbifs? Well, this is a golden age of British cycling, as those Beijing golds testified. The road of course is very different from the track, but we can still offer up the world’s best sprint finisher in the amazing Manxman Mark Cavendish, who will be looking to match or even improve upon his incredible four stage wins last year.
This is a clockwise year, so they’ll be doing the Pyrenees first and then the Alps, with a real sting in the tail on the penultimate day when the riders tackle the legend of a climb that is Mont Ventoux, rising more than 6,000ft above the sun-baked Provençal countryside. How hard is this climb? Well, it was here, on the fearsome, baking moonscape of its upper slopes, that Britain’s greatest ever cyclist, Tom Simpson, collapsed and died in the 1967 Tour. But then again, his body was not free of illegal substances…
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