a history of the tour

Robert Messenger reviews Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France, 1903–2003 in most excellent fashion. The first couple of paragraphs sum up what's so great about cycling as a sport in general and the Tour de France in particular.

The Tour de France is the most arduous of the world’s sporting events. Riders cover more than 2,000 miles in three weeks at an average speed of around twenty-eight miles per hour. The race can seem more like a test of simple endurance than a display of athletic prowess. The sheer physical effort involved makes it easy to write about its champions in terms of epic poetry.

The race defies ordinary explanation. It is a team sport in which an individual wins. It is an athletic event that actually harms the athletes’ bodies. (Racers cannot consume enough food to replace the 6,000 or so calories burned off by each day’s stage. Most finish the race with less muscle mass than they began with.) The race’s founder, Henri Desgrange, wanted it to be so tough that there would be only a single finisher. He never got his wish, but the sport he set in motion takes such a savage toll on its riders that studies show that the life expectancy of a professional cyclist is barely more than fifty years.

And the last couple recap last year's unbelievably exciting Tour and set up this year's...

The centennial race in 2003 was itself thrilling to follow. Armstrong joined Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, and Indurain in the five-time-winner’s club, but only after as competitive a Tour as we have seen since the late 1980s. Armstrong was decisively challenged by three riders. Luck also seemed to have returned to the Tour: Armstrong narrowly avoided serious injury after a fall took one of his chief rivals from the Tour, and later survived two odd crashes to win the key stage on Luz-Ardiden. The great German Jan Ullrich finished second again after crashing during the final time-trial, his last chance to overcome Armstrong. It was a marvelous three weeks.

This summer, Armstrong will seek to do what no other champion could do: win number six. His four predecessors were all beaten by younger determined men who had seen that the king had grown weak. Armstrong may have sent that message last July. We shall know in a month.

We're riding our bicycles in the local Fourth of July parade this weekend--(flashback to the year my mother dressed me up as a clown and put paper mache through my wheel spokes and I STILL didn't win the damn best decoration contest because this little rich chick had a kitten in her basket with a Yankee Doodle hat)--which should be fun. The owners of the new local bike shop where we dropped a fortune on stuff last night (a new cycling outfit for my birthday and assorted etc.) will be riding their Penny Farthing.

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