The Tour de France has reached the first rest day, yesterday. For Johnny Hoogerland, the Dutch cyclist who found himself lying in a barbed wire fence yesterday lacerated to bits (33 stitches required), thanks to the most idiotic driving I’ve ever seen on a tour, it couldn’t come at a better time. Johnny is an aggressive rider, he was in the breakaway attempting to win the requisite points so that he could end up back in the King of the Mountains Jersey. He along with Juan-Antonio Flecha – the sky rider who gets hit by the car first, both managed to finish the stage which is astounding when you see the aftermath of the crash. Johnny said to Flecha before he was carted off for multiple stitches, ‘At least we are still alive.’
Wouter Weylandt died on the 9th May in this year’s Giro D’Italia and that remains fresh in all the riders’ minds.
The Tour this year has seen multiple crashes. The guardian has a gallery that focuses on the first week of crashes in this year’s tour. We have seen the exit of the following riders from this year’s tour.
Vinokorov – Broken hip and femur
Brakovich – concussion / head wound
Wiggins – Broken collar bone
Zabriskie – broken wrist
Van der Broecke – broken shoulder
Boonen – Shoulder injury
Horner – Broken Nose
That list is just one from memory and is not a complete one. Luck is going to play a massive part as it always does in deciding who wears yellow in Paris. The race organizer, Monsieur Christian Prudhomme decided to make this year an interesting race. So we had a team time trial, instead of a prologue. We have no time gains (called bonifications) for winning a stage and instead of the usual pan flat early sprint fests, we had numerous hilly routes and uphill finishes. All this has lead to a tightly fought race with only 5.01mins separating the top twenty riders before we head into the mountains where time gaps can be significant and gains can be made.
The uncertainty, the rain, the tightness at the top of the general classification, has added to a nervousness which has pervaded the bunch. The other thing is that the Tour has grown to become a huge media circus increasing the number of cars following the race. The Skoda ad for this year’s tour is cool. But seeing cyclists being carted off the road in stretchers is not.
As a fan of road racing I grow tired of people asking me questions like ‘How many of them are on drugs?’ I can’t answer that question. What I can say is that the clean men have my utmost admiration for attempting to win a race which is 3430.5km’s long over 21 stages, and I do believe that many of them are attempting to do this without recourse to drugs. They build towards it; the entire season is aimed at winning either a stage or being on the podium. What we don’t see is the thousands of training kilometers in abject weather that goes into preparing for this three week gladiatorial contest. Then along comes an idiot in a car who ends up putting you in the ditch. Or the guy in front of you goes down, you pull the breaks, go over the top, put out your arm and your collar bone snaps. In a few seconds the Tour dream is over for another year.
Like many sports the buzzing language of TV, revenue streams and sponsors are all over the Tour De France. It is understandable – this is how sport operates in the 21st century. In many ways live sport for many has become the new opium. But along the way the riders, the men who give us these magnificent tales of glory, pain and sacrifice have been relegated to bit players. Without the cyclists, without these ‘convicts of the road‘, there is no Tour. Without the cyclists all you have is empty roads winding through spectacular countryside. The only crowd that will gather is hill walkers.
As Nicolas Roche said presciently last Thursday in his tour diary “The Riders are just the show, when the show is over, the riders become nothing again.” The tour may well be the hottest ticket amongst the bourgeois for these weeks in July, but for the rest of us it is the cyclists who make the tour; they’re the ones who need to be protected and looked after. The tour organisers need to remember this. The Rider’s are the men who could be kings, the ones who bring to life this epic drama. Sure they need luck and they need courage. They need to be allowed to do battle on the road.
The cyclists are the stars. Let’s remember that. We come to see them. Some of them end up in a ditch with their bike as broken as the dream of Tour glory, but the resiliance to overcome this is what makes the Tour the epic quest it is.
Vive Le Tour! Vive Le Courer!
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The link above – ‘A Convict of the Road‘ is to a great radio documentary about the legendary Kerry man Mick Murhpy and his quest to win the Rás.
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