Tour de France

Subject: The Tour de France.

The sporting scene has been growing full blast this weekend with Wimbledon, the Silverstone GP and crucial stages in the Tour de France.
My first love was cycling if for no other reason than I did so much of it as a teenager. The bicycle was the means of getting around outside the normal commute. Today the assumption is a car, then a car was far beyond the means of an apprentice wage. Most weekends were spent on the bike in the company of one cycling club friends.  Meeting at the park gates at 8.00am we were off in a crocodile of pairs, two abreast chatting about the events of Saturday night or the anticipation of today as we rolled along the road out of suburbia and into the Yorkshire Dales. We had been blessed to be born near the Dales with all its profundity of landscape and seasons. The quaint villages nestling in the valleys, each isolated from the next by steep hills, each developing its own character through this isolation.
It was a time of relatively insignificant traffic and into the Dales we had the roads pretty much to ourselves. The motorist then were much more laid back, much less in a rush to be somewhere else, much more inclined to give the lads and lasses on their bikes the time and space for all to enjoy the countryside and the pleasure being of 'out and about'.
The muscle throwing climbs and the exhilarating descents were the order of the day but nothing compared to Chris Froome's race saving slow, painstaking claw back of the distance lost from his main rival after suffering a mechanical failure whilst riding in the peloton. As soon as his bike broke the other General classification contenders were off sensing a race turning moment as the yellow jersey clad Froome was left at the side of the road waiting for a replacement bike. It says so much for the mental strength of Froome that he never panicked but proceeded to grind away or rather in his style, to twiddle a low gear up the impossibly steep gradient, clawing back metre by metre the space between him and the pack. A herculean effort and one for which he deserves the Tour.
The Tour de France is a remarkable feat of endurance. An athletic Mount Everest, where for three weeks the riders have to contest the contours of France.

Mountain passes with majestic names, Mont Ventoux, (21 kilometres of climbing where the British cyclist Tommy Simpson died whilst pushing too hard on the mountain), Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees where previous heroes of the race had cemented their strength and fitness on everyone else. Fifteen days in the saddle, riding on average 200 k each day stages with sometimes inhuman mountain climbs up which no normal cyclist could even ride never mind race. The fans choking the narrow road, waving their flags, urging their favourites along almost hysterical with the frenzy of the moment.

When Mo Farah does his wonderful thing over the 5000m or 10,000m we wonder at his stamina and understand that between races he needs a couple of rest days. For the Tour riders there are virtually no rest days. Each morning brings another long day in the saddle with average speeds of 40 kph and average put into perspective when you consider the speed on the mountain stages plummets to 10kph and lower.
Professional cycling has obtained a bad name for drug use but it's hardly surprising when the stimulant is not to give an edge over a competitor but used to provide a resilience to the pain and fatigue this race of races brings to the human frame.