Le Tour de France, La Grande Boucle. My annual three weeks of dreaming, of wishing, of hoping. Of reflecting on what was, on what could have been and on what will never be. Of being inspired, being transported, being amazed.
I don’t miss a pedal stroke, a gear change, a tournesol brightly following the path of the sun, a chateau grandly alluding to an era gone by, a church steeple pin-pointing to heaven, a mountain peak majestically bursting through the clouds.
When this year’s race started, I didn’t have a clear favourite to support, not a rider, not a team. The first week was drawing to a close. The Tour had rolled off the Passage du Gois at low tide, wound through the oyster beds of Bretagne, passed under the watchful eye of the magnificent Le Mont Saint-Michel and was hurtling past the Chaînes des Puys through the Massif Central towards the Pyrénées.
And I wasn’t sitting up yet.
Then there was Stage 9. The last day of the first week. The last day before the first rest day. The Tour rolled out of Issoire at noon that overcast Sunday. Standing up through the sunroof of his post-box red Skoda, Christian Prudhomme dropped the white Depart flag and 187 of the original 198 riders set off on the up-and-down profile.
The feeding zone was just over a third of the way in, the intermediate sprint point 30 km before the finish, and seven categorized climbs lay scattered over the route. But, on that glorious Sunday in La Belle France, the Tour erupted like the Puys did 10,000 years ago.
The Peloton came flowing down Le Puy Mary, the first of three Cat-2 climbs, faster than red hot lava. Around a sweeping left bend just over halfway through the stage, someone had lost it. In an attempt to avoid the carnage on the road, Vinokourov was catapulted into the forest, fracturing his femur, forcing an early exit to what would have been his last Grande Boucle.
Then came Hoogerland’s tour de force into the prikkeldraad (barbed wire fence) and into the Polka Dot jersey and into every sport headline and straight into my heart!! Fletcha crawled out of a ditch and the driver of the French TV car that chose to hit the riders over a tree, sped off!
The lead group of five was now reduced to three.
