That moment when Michael Woods surged past Matteo Jorgenson on the final climb of the Puy de Dome in stage nine of the Tour de France was full of what the kids call “the feels.” Here was a fellow Canadian winning at the top of one of the most storied climbs in bike racing in the most dramatic fashion – it was something to cheer about. Yet, as I watched the life go out of Jorgenson, who had gone out on a breakaway 40 km before, I knew at least some of that disappointment.
I always cheer for the breakaway, those great, heroic forlorn hopes of bike racing that sometimes improbably pay off. I remember watching “le roi des échappées” Jacky Durand go off on impossible flyers year after year in the Tour that brought him victory twice, or the three back-to-back breakaways by Laurent Jalabert in 2002. It is always crushing to witness the moment when the breakaway is swallowed by the peloton, or when a brave warrior, having cast his lot, is pipped on the line after 100 km on the roads alone. Yet, sometimes they win.
Those emotions, of ecstasy and despair – the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat – are what bike racing is about. They are the payoff for watching the epic contest of strength, cunning, and will play out through the countryside and roads of France every July; why millions of people have watched obsessively in newspaper pages, newsreels, and television broadcasts in 110 editions of the Tour since 1903. It is sports opera of Wagnerian proportions.
I have been following the Tour de France since 1982. Not watching it, exactly, since the greatest bike race in the world did not appear on Canadian and American television, except in occasional clips on shows like ABC’s Wide World of Sports which featured about ten minutes of the race in the summer of 1975. Bernard Thévenet denied “the Cannibal” Eddy Merckx his sixth yellow jersey that year which, I suppose, was especially newsworthy.
I became fully conscious of bike racing as an exciting competitive sport (as opposed to a fun thing to do around the neighborhood on my gold-flecked Baycrest banana seat bike with the high-rise handlebars) in the summer of 1976, when my father and I stood at the side of the Camilien Houde Parkway in Montreal, watching the Olympic road race whizz up Mont Royal. Sweden’s Bernt Johansson won that one. For a suburban kid who had grown up watching professional wrestling and roller derby on Sunday mornings as I waited for Ultra-Man to appear on the black-and-white TV in the family room, this was high drama. It certainly wasn’t professional wrestling.
The bike boom was booming then. Documentaries like Michael Pfleghar and Hans Gottschalk’s film The Greatest Show on Earth, about the 1974 Giro d’Italia, and Jorgen Leth’s films Stars and Watercarriers and, above all, A Sunday in Hell were making the film festival and arthouse circuit. I saw the latter film, the definitive portrait of Paris-Roubaix, at the Seville Theatre on Sherbrooke Street the winter after the Montreal Olympic Games. Breaking Away, Peter Yates’s cycling cult film, opened in July 1979. That winter, my friend Bruno Carrasco and I spent our time skiing at Mont Tremblant, Mont Saint-Sauveur, and other mountains in the Laurentians speaking in cinematic Italian accents.
I imagined myself as a pint-sized Joop Zoetemelk in wool shorts and jersey as I rode my Raleigh Record in Ti-Raleigh livery through the Macdonald College campus and the country roads west of Montreal. I asked my neighbors, the Van Eykens at one end of the street, and the Boysens, at the other ends of the street, to teach me a few words of Dutch. They must have thought I was insane.
I switched my allegiances to Bernard Hinault, Renault-Elf, and France (in that order) in 1982 when I saw the picture of le Blaireau in the Montreal Gazette sports pages clinching the Yellow Jersey in the Tour de France’s stage 11 time trial. Had I known the term “badass” at the time (I was yet unschooled in Blaxploitation cinema), I would have said that the Badger was a total badass. And there was nothing a reedy, bookish, bespectacled Jewish highschooler wanted to be more at that moment than a badass. Instead, I was a star debater. So… Not exactly a badass.
It didn’t hurt that Greg Lemond was Hinault’s teammate, or that my countryman Steve Bauer joined them on the La Vie Claire team in 1985. I was all-in for Hinault and his dysfunctional band of brothers, in their brilliant, brightly-colored cycling kit (still the best jersey design in the history of pro bike racing). More importantly, the success of North Americans – a Canadian, no less, who would go on to win a stage! – ensured the expansion of Tour coverage on Canadian and American television.
The TV coverage faded to a trickle year-after-year once the bike boom ended, after Lemond went into retirement, and as mountain biking grabbed everyone’s attention in the 1990s. I guess I am partly to blame for that, as I traded up my Raleigh (a Grand Prix now) for a Specialized Stumpjumper and hit the dirt. I remember following my new road cycling hero Tony Rominger – perennially Monsieur Deuxième during Miguel Indurain’s five-year reign – mostly in the newspaper. I was poor then, and didn’t have cable TV; it’s possible that le Tour de France just wasn’t coming in on the rabbit ears.
Then, Lance Armstrong changed everything when he came back from cancer to win the 1999 Tour de France. The comeback story of the plucky American who returned from certain death to win the toughest race on earth was tailor-made for American sports television. The story seemed too good to be true – as it, in fact, turned out to be – and Lance mania sparked a new bike boom. Pretty soon, everyone was talking about Phil (Liggett) and Paul (Sherwen) as if they were old pals, ordering past races on VHS from their World Cycling Productions, and lining up to buy Trek OCLV bikes at the bike shop where I worked.
I was as excited as everyone else and subscribed to cable television for the first time just to get Outdoor Life Network in order to watch the Tour. It was a daily obsession for three weeks in July that I couldn’t miss. Cycling friends who didn’t have cable would come by every evening to watch the (truncated) replay with beer and chips. It was life.
… But it got tedious. It was clear by the 2002 Tour that Armstrong was just phoning it in. He seemed bored. While Team ONCE grimpeur Joseba Beloki and US Postal super domestique Roberto Heras battled for second place in an epic duel on the slopes of Plateau de Beille, Armstrong seemed to be spending just another day at the office. There was no drama for him, no suffering, and no overcoming obstacles. As it tuned out, there was no drama, nor was there meant to be; just a cunning plan and the best-organized, most systematic doping program in professional sports.
I knew that there were drugs in cycling. I had read all about the Festina Affair in 1998, and I remember seeing that photo in Velonews of the peloton sitting on the road from Albertville protesting the expulsions. A former Columbian pro whom I knew at the time once said that there are two kinds of grand tour riders, “the ones who are riding clean, and the ones who make it to the end of the third week. There’s a third kind, too,” he said. “Maybe a half-dozen riders on the Champs Élysées are completely clean. But they don’t win.”
Bike racing is the original extreme sport. Although the first Tour de France, in 1903 had only six stages, the shortest, from Toulouse to Bordeaux, was 268 km (167 miles). Marurice Garin completed the 471 km (293 mile) final stage, from Nantes to Paris, in a little over 18 hours and clinched the overall win. In 1910, Tour organizers added the Col de Tourmalet, the first of the high mountain stages, and racers complained that they were trying to kill them. Extreme sport led to extreme measures, and cheating was rampant, from racers who took trains to racers who took drugs for the competitive edge.
The French journalist André Londres met up with Henri and Francis Pélissier after they had abandoned the 1924 Tour over a dispute with race organizer Henri Desgrange. “’You have no idea of what the Tour de France is,’ Henri says, ‘it’s a Calvary . . . We suffer on the roads . . . You want to know how we keep going? Voilà…’ He pulls a phial from his bag. ‘That’s cocaine for the eyes, and that’s chloroform for the gums… and pills, you want to see pills? Voilà the pills.’ Each pull out three boxes. ‘In short,’ says Francis, ‘we keep going on dynamite.’”
Britain’s Tom Simpson died of a heart attack from heatstroke aggravated by his amphetamine use on the slopes of Mon Ventoux in 1967. Dutchman Johannes Draaijer, riding for the PDM-Concorde team, died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1990; he was 26-years old, and his blood had been thickened to pudding by EPO. Marco Pantani, maybe the greatest pure climber in the history of the sport died of a cocaine overdose in 2004, after being used as a guinea pig by “sports medicine” practitioner Francesco Conconi for more than a decade and then summarily discarded after the 2003 season.
I had no illusions about the sport; by the early 2000s, doubtless inspired by Armstrong’s winning ways and the axiom that nothing succeeds like success, you’d hear about amateur racers swapping vials of Procrit and Epogen at the local races, seeking that extra edge for pin money, glory and bragging rights. By Armstrong’s fifth fraudulent victory in the Tour de France, drugs were everywhere in the sport.
But the great American hero took it all to the next level. His US Postal team had been built from the ground up as a doping operation; it was hardly a secret to anyone, but Armstrong, Tailwind Sports (the owners of the USPS team), and his enablers in the sports media, like Phil Liggett and Bob Roll, used every means at their disposal to bully and intimidate his critics. And the UCI, the sport’s scandal-averse governing body, let them get away with it, worried that revelations of the truth would damage the plump American media market.
I stopped paying attention to the Tour de France in 2003, and intentionally ignored it in 2004 and 2005. The bike shop where I worked part-time in those years was a Trek dealer that sold US Postal and Discovery replica gear like crack to the local roadies (pun intended), but I didn’t care. Once I fully accepted the kayfabe the Tour, which had sustained me for three decades, had become little more than dreary, put-on theater, the WWF on wheels. I turned my attention to cyclocross and the one-day races and let the Tour ride on down that road without me.
Cadel Evans changed everything for me in 2011. I had watched him dominate the mountain biking World Cup in the late 1990s and cheered as he crossed the line to win at Mont Sainte-Anne in 2000. When I heard that Evans was in the Yellow Jersey after the stage 20 time trial, I sat up and took notice. Here was an outsider – an Australian mountain biker – who had shaken-up the world of road cycling. My curiosity was piqued and, over the last dozen years, I have been paying increasingly close attention, to the point that I again organize my July days completely around la grande boucle.
Since I rediscovered the greatest of all bike races, Chris Froome won four times, there have been scandals, and Team Sky/Ineos, and then UAE Emirates, and then Jumbo-Visma have dominated. But the Tour de France no longer feels as if it is all about scandals and domination. Unlike in those seven years of the Armstrong Syndicate, it feels like a race again, where anything can happen, and a Danish fish plant worker can attack the Slovenian race favorite on the Col de Granon to grab the Yellow Jersey with a three-minute lead. As I write this, waiting to watch the individual time trial on the evening replay, Vingegaard is mere seconds ahead of Pogacar in the third week, and the race is still up in the air.
This is not professional wrestling.
That’s what brought me to the Tour de France, and to the sport of cycling, in the first place. It is three weeks of unscripted, unplanned, un-kayfabed drama and thrills; opera – in fact, a Wagnerian epic like The Ring – in which anything can happen. Today’s winner is tomorrow’s loser and, even though I am firmly on team Vingegaard this year, I will wish him well and hope that Tom Pidcock or some other hungry young racer (preferably French) beats him next year. I will always cheer for the breakaway and the unheralded champion because that, in my mind, is what the sport of cycling is all about. After those monotonous years in which the greatest bike race in the world was about nothing so much as mechanical, systematic domination and cheating, the Tour de France is again about split seconds, big gambles, and long-shots. It reminds me that, sometimes, the breakaway does go all the way.