C'est merveilleux, le Tour de France
Le Tour de France, the best sporting event in the world, starts on Saturday and runs - with a couple rest days - until July 24. I can't wait.
This year's Tour is Lance Armstrong's chance to win a seventh consecutive maillot jaune. No one else has ever won so many Tours, much less so many in a row. But it's worth paying attention to the race even without that drama, because the Tour is the simply the most compelling and engrossing sports event around, putting to shame everything and anything we can offer. The Super Bowl can suck it hard.
Part of the appeal for me is the diversity of challenges which the riders face. There are, of course, numerous "easy" or "flat" stages which, at upwards of 200km (ca. 125 miles) long, are grueling endurance events that usually end in a terrifying "field sprint" of 100-plus riders to the line or in a magnificent breakaway by some strong fool who simply outraces everyone else. (Occasionally, heartbreakingly, the two outcomes combine when the peloton gathers up a break just before the line, negating all the escapees' hard work.) Then there are man-against-the-clock time trials in which each rider starts alone and just tries to go as fast as he can. A late TT this year might determine who wins the Tour. But before that point, this year's Tour will go up and down numerous mountain stages on whose climbs, as the cliche goes, "the Tour is won or lost."
And the climbs bring me to the real reason I love the Tour: the language. I love the names of the places, which become shorthand for pain, misery, and triumph: the famous switchbacks of l'Alpe d'Huez, the skull-like finish on Mont Ventoux (a climb so hard it killed a man: Tom Simpson on Friday the 13th of July, 1967) , the brutal ascent of the Col du Galibier, the horror of the Col de la Madeleine.
More than the exoticism of the French names, though, I love the terms used to describe the Tour. As with any sport, there is a lot of jargon. For instance, the worst climbs (like those above) are "HC" or "hors categorie" - in other words, immeasurably hard. In the country where they invented the metric system, that's saying something. There are lots of other Tour words: peloton = main pack; domestique = good-but-not-great rider who makes sure the team leader has water and food; crack = lose the ability to compete, whether from oxygen debt, dehydration, or lack of will.
But finally, I love the Tour's brilliant terms of art, which, voiced in an English accent over jumpy footage of skinny men on narrow Alpine road, always make my hair stand on end. A bad collision might lead to a rider's crashing out of the Tour - you don't just quit, you crash out. A rider can put time into his rivals by accelerating when they can't; the metaphor of penetration makes me always think of Armstrong somehow stabbing his opponent with a blade made of minutes and seconds. Lithe little climbers (goats, as in "mountain goats") like the late Marco Pantani or anyone from Colombia are sometimes described as dancing on the pedals when they rise up out of the saddle and speed away up the worst climb. And then there's being put into difficulty, a phrase that's best exclaimed when a strong rider attacks and his rivals cannot. "Armstrong has put Ullrich into difficulty! The big German has cracked!" It sounds so prosaic - "to be put into difficulty" - and yet also so entrappingly final: he does it to them against their will, and they can't do anything about it. Here's hoping Lance puts a few people into difficulty come Saturday.
(The best place to follow the Tour is the Velonews website, which has great daily articles, stage summaries, and minute-by-minute updates as each stage evolves.)
This year's Tour is Lance Armstrong's chance to win a seventh consecutive maillot jaune. No one else has ever won so many Tours, much less so many in a row. But it's worth paying attention to the race even without that drama, because the Tour is the simply the most compelling and engrossing sports event around, putting to shame everything and anything we can offer. The Super Bowl can suck it hard.
Part of the appeal for me is the diversity of challenges which the riders face. There are, of course, numerous "easy" or "flat" stages which, at upwards of 200km (ca. 125 miles) long, are grueling endurance events that usually end in a terrifying "field sprint" of 100-plus riders to the line or in a magnificent breakaway by some strong fool who simply outraces everyone else. (Occasionally, heartbreakingly, the two outcomes combine when the peloton gathers up a break just before the line, negating all the escapees' hard work.) Then there are man-against-the-clock time trials in which each rider starts alone and just tries to go as fast as he can. A late TT this year might determine who wins the Tour. But before that point, this year's Tour will go up and down numerous mountain stages on whose climbs, as the cliche goes, "the Tour is won or lost."
And the climbs bring me to the real reason I love the Tour: the language. I love the names of the places, which become shorthand for pain, misery, and triumph: the famous switchbacks of l'Alpe d'Huez, the skull-like finish on Mont Ventoux (a climb so hard it killed a man: Tom Simpson on Friday the 13th of July, 1967) , the brutal ascent of the Col du Galibier, the horror of the Col de la Madeleine.
More than the exoticism of the French names, though, I love the terms used to describe the Tour. As with any sport, there is a lot of jargon. For instance, the worst climbs (like those above) are "HC" or "hors categorie" - in other words, immeasurably hard. In the country where they invented the metric system, that's saying something. There are lots of other Tour words: peloton = main pack; domestique = good-but-not-great rider who makes sure the team leader has water and food; crack = lose the ability to compete, whether from oxygen debt, dehydration, or lack of will.
But finally, I love the Tour's brilliant terms of art, which, voiced in an English accent over jumpy footage of skinny men on narrow Alpine road, always make my hair stand on end. A bad collision might lead to a rider's crashing out of the Tour - you don't just quit, you crash out. A rider can put time into his rivals by accelerating when they can't; the metaphor of penetration makes me always think of Armstrong somehow stabbing his opponent with a blade made of minutes and seconds. Lithe little climbers (goats, as in "mountain goats") like the late Marco Pantani or anyone from Colombia are sometimes described as dancing on the pedals when they rise up out of the saddle and speed away up the worst climb. And then there's being put into difficulty, a phrase that's best exclaimed when a strong rider attacks and his rivals cannot. "Armstrong has put Ullrich into difficulty! The big German has cracked!" It sounds so prosaic - "to be put into difficulty" - and yet also so entrappingly final: he does it to them against their will, and they can't do anything about it. Here's hoping Lance puts a few people into difficulty come Saturday.
(The best place to follow the Tour is the Velonews website, which has great daily articles, stage summaries, and minute-by-minute updates as each stage evolves.)
posted by Christopher Tassava at Thursday, June 30, 2005
2 Comments:
Question: I'm SOOO not in the know on this, but isn't there supposed to be rampant steroid and other performance-enhancing drug use on the Tour? And if there is, does that make it less exciting/admirable/what have you? And if not, why?
Not trying to be incendiary, just curious. Looking to be educated, really.
The use of performance-enhancing drugs is apparently common on the Tour, but then dope is common in all major professional sports from "endurance" sports like bike racing, cross-country skiing, and track and field to "impact" sports like football or baseball. (I don't think steroids are too common in bike racing, since racers usually prefer to be small and strong with high abilities to process oxygen - hence the use of EPO and other blood-doping agents.)
And while it would be great if everyone was clean, I doubt it's possible or likely, so I prefer to essentially bracket that issue. Certainly, the possibility of doping doesn't detract from the excitement of the Tour for me, especially with inspections being so frequent.
And doped or not, the physical and mental accomplishments of athletes like Armstrong, marathoners, or nordic skiers are still staggering and admirable - at least to me. In fact, partly just because I have skied and biked and run competitively, I'm much more inclined to admire someone like Johann Muhlegg, a cross-country skier who was discredited as a doper after the 2002 Olympics but who had trained and competed at a very high level before then, than someone like Mark McGwire or Jose Canseco, whose skills (to my eye) almost wholly centered on their steroidal muscle-boundness.
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