The Curious Case of the 100th Tour de France

The circus is coming to town. Lock up your doubts and get ready to suspend your disbelief. There’ll be lions, would-be tamers, some high-wire artists and no doubt a clown or three.

Don’t look too deep, stay in your seats and keep your wits about you. Peer no further than the face paint and the bright lights, or you might come a cropper.

Ah, the hoopla is about to begin all over again. The Tour is unlike any other large-scale race in the world, because, well, it is the Tour.

From the early days when men pedalled mind-boggling distances on single speed hard tire clunkers over unpaved roads, through to the modern era of high tech materials and even higher tech drugs, the Tour has always been at the centre of the cycling world.

It is the sun around which this strange, breathtaking little universe spins, and in the collective cycling mind, the Tour’s position is unassailable. Ask any aspiring junior what it is he dreams of when he shuts his eyes and he’ll invariably tell you “wearing Yellow.”

In fact, ask just about any current pro what he dreams about and you’ll probably hear the same response. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure to interview Oscar Freire, the three-time winner of both the World Championships road race and Milan-San Remo.

I asked him which race would he like to win that he hadn’t managed already, and he immediately replied: “The Tour de France – even though it is not possible for me, but yes, that is the one.”

He was a delight to talk to and very polite, but there was such certainty in his answer that it seemed immediately like a pointless question, because it was so obvious.

The Tour. The wonderful, ridiculous, mesmerising, sickening Tour.

The names of the venues that provide the backdrop for its defining moments are etched into the history of the sport.

Alpe d’Huez. Mount Ventoux. The Col du Galibier. The Tourmalet. Luz Ardiden. The Champs-Elysee.

Kings are crowned, princes dance, and villains rear their ugly heads. Some have gotten away with the greatest riches, with legends in tow, while others have been devoured by the beast, having strayed too close to the fire.

The Tour is something that is, ultimately, undefinable. It is not simply its sum. Rather, at its heart are its parts, its moments, those days on those slopes when individuals seized their very own destinies, grappled with their fears and their rivals and came out the other side with their arms in the air and their dreams realised.

Octave Lapize back in 1910 on the Tourmalet. Eddie Merckx on Stage 17 of the 1969 Tour when he soloed over four cols for 140km, winning by 8 minutes.

Looking back at the careers of Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault, Laurent Fignon you can see several other instances, as well as in countless stage victories by riders who only briefly stood in the spotlight.

One of the greatest rides ever in the Tour de France was by an American, named Floyd Landis.

Stage 17 of the 2006 Tour de France. The day before he’d completely lost the plot and with it 10 minutes to the race leader, Oscar Pereiro.

The next day Landis took off in pursuit of a breakaway group with 120 kilometers of the stage to go and with four mountains standing in his way.

They said it was madness. As he sent his team to the front just before he broke clear, others in the pack were shouting at him to call his team off and let the break go.

But he drove them on, then dropped Pereiro, then dropped everyone else and was alone. He swept up the breakaway and dropped them too, one by one.

He won almost six minutes clear from Carlos Sastre and with Pereiro over seven minutes back the American was back in the race for Yellow.

He went on to win the Tour but was stripped of the title after he tested positive for dope on the stage that had, it seemed, sealed his legend.

So, he was cheating. Yet so was just about everyone else in the race, and so, we now can assume, have been the vast majority of stage winners throughout the history of the race.

And thus, in that regard, this truly was one of the greatest rides in the entire history of the great old race.

However, that Landis’ Stage 17 victory can even be considered as one of the great rides tells you something, a very large something, about the state of this sport.

And it was forever thus. In the 1920s when national teams were allowed into the sport, the organiser Henri Desgrange wrote to each team manager to remind them that the Tour would not be supplying the riders with drugs.

That they would be taking them in the first place was a given.

Riders in the old days – up to 1962 – would ride with handkerchiefs tied around their necks that they dipped into a little pot of ether that they kept in their pockets.

We all know about the tragic Tommy Simpson, the English rider who died on Ventoux in the 1967 Tour, having consumed amphetamines and alcohol on a blisteringly hot day.

On and on we can go, Pantani, Armstrong, Virenque, Festina, Puerto, on and on and on.

Last year’s race seemed, briefly, to offer hope. Lance Armstrong had been busted and pretty much left broken by the work of many that was finished off by Travis Tygart, head of USADA.

It felt like we’d stepped out from the shadows and into the light. Surely, we said, the UCI must now clean house and seize this momentous opportunity to finally get it right.

But they didn’t. We’ve had no initiatives, no cleaning, no new decisions.

The cycling fan has a right to feel aggrieved, and if you skim over just about any cycling forum from anywhere in the world, you’ll see that the suspicions of doping are very much alive – and rightly so.

We have every right to be suspicious. But this is the Tour! And yet, even that fact is not inspiring me with the usual excitement.

Contador has fallen from grace in the past two years and whatever we see from him now, well, who knows?

Christopher Froome has been in amazing form and he was pressed this week to deny that he takes PEDs. What is certain thought is that he has very few real rivals this year and so it might be yet another dull race.

What I’d love to see is young riders coming through, people getting tired as the race wears on, and, though it goes against the whole appeal of the sport, less incredible feats. We’ve been around long enough and now, when we watch something and think ‘unbelievable!’ it isn’t exactly muttered in wonder, but in doubt.

So here we stand, just a few short days from the 100th edition of this beast of a race, created by men but now with a life very largely of its own. The circus is back in town, but I don’t want to see the clowns.

Sure, bring on the daredevils, the glitz and the razmattaz, but leave the illusionists out of it this time.