Cycles of Life: The beautiful, corrupt Tour de France.
FOR ALL THE soccer played by Spain, and fine tennis at Wimbledon, something was ailing me this past month. It’s called Tour Fever. My promiscuous love for sports includes rugby (which I played a very long time ago), skiing (which I still relish as an aging downhill daredevil), and cricket (despite the English weather). For obscure reasons, I follow the Red Sox, with little joy at present, and thanks to the hospitality of the University of Texas, where I sometimes lecture, I consider myself a long-range Longhorns fan. In fact, the only sport I simply cannot begin to see the point of is basketball.
But bike racing—and the Tour de France in particular—is at once the sport whose appeal is the most elusive to the sadly uninitiated and the most addictive to those of us who are hooked. Nothing matches the mixture of passion, arcane ritual, high drama, heroism, and skullduggery that the great three-week bike race offers us tifosi (as the Italians call bike-racing fans). Every year, we count down the weeks until the Grand Départ. Then, after the short prologue, the jousting begins on the open roads, team against team, but also rider against rider, with the long breakaways (often forlorn), the temporary alliances, the bitter rivalries, the terrifying sprint finishes, the crashes, and then the celebrations and recriminations. Some of those recriminations occur off-road. On the first Thursday of this year’s Tour, a Dutch newspaper put new speed on the Lance Armstrong saga by naming several American riders who have allegedly testified against Armstrong in return for leniency in their own cases. It will be a grievous blow to Texan pride if the only man to have won the Tour seven times is stripped of his titles. And we tifosi will again have to face up to the fact that we love the sport despite one painfully large part of its history.