As le Tour de France crested its final competitive stage for the race overall, a shortened race for the safety of the riders (in that, not enough of them are cyclocross riders to attempt the landslide-obliterated roads across le Cormet de Roselend), the same team won what had been one of the most entertaining Tours in recent memory. One could call that boring, though it wasn't. One could call it expected, but it didn't look like it would be until the entirely unexpected early termination of the previous day's stage. One could call it a footnote, which, it's not, but it's not the headline, either.
The final result isn’t really why we watch this race. There’s the one big prize, of course, the honor of being “A Winner of Le Tour de France” (at least, unless you’re found to have doped and get your yellow jerseys stripped from you like so much laundry), and three lesser prizes, and the prize commonly acknowledged to be given to the favor of the French crowd. We all have our favorites we cheer for, or our villains we cheer against, but for 21 days, we don’t tune in to see just that.
It’s been five years that I’ve gotten back into watch Le Tour, and I’ve cried at the end of every one. The reasons are different - sometimes Le Tour’s been the one thing keeping me sane while I grapple with unemployment, or with a difficult job, or with the various fears and compromises that come with being alive. Sometimes its just that the directors and editors of the Amaury Sports Organization are incredibly good at their jobs, and the sweeping shots of the Alps, of the riders crossing the fields of wheat and sunflowers, of the faces of pain and struggle, men
pushing their bodies to places they aren’t supposed to go - you’re supposed to feel something. You’re supposed to, first, want to go to France (something I feel with every bone in my body, a physical yearning for the mountains that could also be fulfilled with a trip to Colorado), but second, to have a purely emotional response to a sport that fundamentally makes no sense.
It’s a stupid, beautiful race. It’s every man for himself, other than the men charged with burning every last ounce of resolve and carbo-gel fueled muscle for someone else. It’s seeing every single little church over the age of 100 on the broadcast and knowing that the riders know almost nothing of what they’re speeding past. It’s something that gets Americans up early, keeps Australians up late, and throws a bunch of people together in a single Slack room filled with more capital letters than the average ransom note.
It’s easier to describe what Le Tour is than why I care about it so much. Le Tour is 22 teams of eight men each racing for 21 days over some of the best terrain - but only some of - in the world for the honor of a yellow shirt and the chance to raise what is essentially a large dinner plate. It’s a race where you can win the whole thing without ever having won a single day, and the single day winner could also be in the bottom half of the standings at the end (and many of them will be). It’s a big ol’ complicated mess that is deeply, deeply French and yet not won by a Frenchman for over 30 years. It’s deeply problematic, has a horrendous issue with sexism (the women’s race organized by the same group was one day long this year and got less than a tenth the fanfare), and yet somehow one of the purest expressions of sport.
Even in attempting to write about it dryly I can’t help but go into the floweriest of language. It’s that kind of a thing, and that’s part of why I love it. It’s a 19-day vacation from the comfort of my couch (well, and for those early morning 200 km day starts, my bed). It’s the fans who line the side of the road, and wishing I were one of them, seeing the peloton go by in a five-second blur. The motorcycle going around the curve in the road, the sky opening up beyond it, the riders a meaningless speck in the helicopter shot of the high valley, or across a wheat field. The feeling of possibility at every start line, when everything is new and five to ten to thirty guys think they might just have a shot. The way it is so easy to completely immerse yourself in this - or you can let it skim by, enjoying the kind of vistas that even few films can provide.
Why do I love this most ridiculous of things? Because it’s there. Because it’s a bunch of mad idiots on bikes who point themselves at some of the highest mountains in the world and say — let’s go.
