For the Tour de France, this is the best of times and the worst of times. When Le Grand Depart takes place in London on the weekend of July 7 and 8, millions will be privileged to witness the greatest free festival in sport, an annual carnival of joy and colour as quintessentially French in its essence yet as international in its appeal as baguettes and Burgundy. But thanks to the seemingly endless doping scandals of the past few years the race will start without several of those riders who would have been among the favourites and under a persistent shadow of suspicion.
Britain has never been more ready for the honour of hosting both the prologue, a time-trial around some of the capital’s most famous landmarks, and the first stage, which winds from the Greenwich meridian to the ancient city walls of Canterbury. At every level, from urban commuters through amateur cyclosportive riders to such world stars of road and velodrome as Victoria Pendleton, Nicole Cooke, Bradley Wiggins, Chris Hoy and Mark Cavendish, cycling in the United Kingdom is enjoying an enormous surge in popularity. Pound for pound cycling could currently be said to enjoy the status of Britain’s most successful sport and London’s capture of this year’s Tour opening represents a wonderful opportunity to broaden its appeal as a competitive activity and a recreation.
Huge crowds turned out in 1994, the last time the race crossed the Channel, to watch two stages, one from Dover to Brighton and a second in Portsmouth. But to have the 2007 Tour start in London takes Britain’s relationship with the event to another level. The Tour’s last great party took place four years ago, when the race celebrated its founding by Henri Desgrange in 1903. In a sense it is generous of the Tour, its myths and legends woven so deeply into the fabric of France over the past 100 years, to share its essence with neighbouring countries, although the gesture also makes excellent financial sense for the organisers. A failed attempt a few years ago at a more extensive project known as mondialisation — there was even talk of a stage in New York — did not deter the race from continuing to venture across the odd frontier.
The two-wheeled relationship between Britain and France has been mostly one-way, with British cyclists emulating the habits and adopting the vocabulary of their neighbours. This year’s Tour is an opportunity to show the race’s homeland that Britain is now as passionate about the sport as a France which has not produced a Tour winner of its own since the last of Bernard Hinault’s five victories in 1985.
Curiously enough what seems to have been the first organised bike race in history took place in France and was won by an Englishman. On May 31, 1868, the 19-year-old James Moore, born in Bury St Edmunds to a blacksmith who moved his family to Paris when his son was a small child, triumphed in a race in the Parc de St Cloud. It lasted less than four minutes but the following November he also won the first endurance race, from Paris to Rouen, covering the 85 miles in just under ten and a half hours on his wooden-wheeled pedivelle. That gruelling event could be seen as the forerunner of the one-day classics and, by extension, the stage races of which the Tour was the first and remains the greatest.
In this year’s Tour, the absence of Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and Floyd Landis, all removed from the field by various forms of doping probe, means that the destiny of the yellow jersey is unusually hard to predict. The giants of the race — the multiple winners such as Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Hinault, Greg LeMond, Miguel Indurain and Lance Armstrong — have been all-rounders, skilled at climbing mountains and racing against the clock. But the Tour’s legends are written in blood and sweat in the remote passes of the Pyrenees and the Alps, and perhaps 2007 will see a pure climber emerging to recreate the epic feats of men with nicknames such as the Angel of the Mountains and the Eagle of Toledo — Charly Gaul and Federico Bahamontes respectively, winners in 1958 and 1959.
For British spectators, there will be a tiny taste of that sort of competition on the three fourth-category climbs in the North Downs that stud the 126-mile route from Greenwich to Canterbury. Later comes the real thing, on the mighty cols of the Cormet de Roselend, the Galibier, the Telegraphe, the Port de Pailheres, the Plateau de Beille, the Peyresourde, the Marie-Blanque and the Aubisque.
Humming along a sun-dappled country lane in a whirr of tanned legs and a kaleidoscope of magenta, aquamarine and tangerine shirts, preceded by the raucous publicity caravan, surrounded by motorcycle-borne cameramen, surveyed from above by TV helicopters and pursued by a fleet of service cars, the riders seem to glide past in a frictionless universe. But bike-racing requires suffering to test its limits, which is both the sport’s blessing and its curse. Unique in its demands, the Tour de France is the ultimate expression of those extremes as it pushes the riders of 21 teams through 2,206 miles of pain, humiliation and ecstasy in three remorseless weeks. And for two days this summer, Britain can share in its story.