Homers' Corner: The French Affair: The Tour de France

Illustration by Jennifer Universe.

I was about eleven years-old when I got my first 10-speed. It was a used-up mess, but to me, it was beautiful. The chipped metallic blue paint never hindered the rocket-fast frame under my body. This upgrade from my pink, banana seat starter bike led me directly to the Bicycle Clinic, the local bike shop, for a tune up and an introduction to a world far beyond the Huffy.

The Bicycle Clinic was where the true gearheads in town sat around in spandex, their steel frame bikes in stands, as the mechanics worked crank shafts and lubed gears. The high pitch zipper of metal humming and the smell of WD-40 was intoxicating. I spent hours in the shop just hanging around, asking about shifters and derailleurs and thumbing through old issues of Bicycling. The dudes at the shop were the essence of cool. They could fix anything and make it all look faster and foreign. Everything in the shop felt otherworldly, uniquely un-American. The bikes, the parts, even the posters of blurred cyclists on the wall, were Italian, or German, or best yet, French.

The biggest poster on the wall was of an American cycling god, whose own name even sounded French, LeMond. Greg LeMond with his tussled, sun-kissed hair (gods- and the eighties- had no need for helmets), vastus muscles rounded and defined over his knees, was a human machine strapped to a carbon fiber missile. But it wasn’t the man I found so intriguing, it was the sport, and more importantly the race in the backdrop of the poster: the Tour de France.

I scoured my local library for books about the race. I learned about its history; a race started by two rival sports papers who essentially decided the longer the race, the better the sales of their newspapers. That it quickly became a race of egos and bravado, fueled by crazy prize money, and vicious supporters inserting themselves all over the multiple day course. I learned about the classifications and the jerseys assigned to the leaders of each category. I learned the hierarchy of the teams, from the captain to the miserable role of the domestiques. I learned about the technical skill involved in a mountain stage versus a sprinter stage and what to expect from a flat finish or a climb above the tree line like Col du Galibier in the Alps.

One Saturday, the guys at the Bicycle Clinic wheeled a TV into the shop. ABC’s Wide World of Sports was airing the final stage of the Tour. There it was. The movie of the poster. Hundreds of legs, a mechanical ballet, pumping through the streets of Paris like a line of wheeled ants on the Champs-Élysées and around l’Arc de Triomphe.

I rode my junker on the rural county highways around the lake, a twelve-mile loop with rolling hills and long stretches of corn fields. Sometimes I was racing away from the peloton, an ill-advised break away, sometimes I was working from the back tracking down my captain with water and a protein bar. It didn’t matter that I was a small girl in Southeastern Wisconsin on a clunker of a bike, my motivation and my mind was always somewhere in the Pyrenees or the cobblestone streets of Paris.

Eventually, I saved up my babysitting money for a real Trek and took my fantasy to the next level. I entered a few local races, did the road race and the criterium one year for the Badger State Games, but it wasn’t the same glorious fantasy of the Tour. The mystique just wasn’t there.

Never once in all those years did I engage with the reality of the sport and particularly of the Tour: that it was only for men* or its notorious legacy of doping. I just didn’t care. It was a romance with the illusion of it all, a French love affair.

That romance still holds me riveted today. I mean, fuck Lance Armstrong, that guy is a horrible human, but for me it never was about one athlete. The Tour de France was built on antics—the advantages a team could make for itself has always been a part of it. It was chaos in the beginning and still is to this day. All of this aside, the draw for me is simple: it is fascinating and breathtaking. Man, mountain, and machine are out to foil any given racer’s day at any given turn.

Maybe as if to balance the murky nature of the sport, the Tour’s long-time announcer, and perhaps the loveliest man in the business, Phil Liggett provides the daily commentary of the unfolding action. His history lessons of the architecture and geography complete the illusion of this fantastical affair. He gives us personal insights and connections to the riders and this year’s race. And his uninterrupted play by play of the final 5K, the riders in sheer agony dancing on their pedals, has my children and I standing to watch every morning, holding our collective breath as if we too are screaming across dodgy French pavement on wheels too thin for physics.

I don’t even own a road bike anymore. I barely even ride for pleasure. The Bicycle Clinic of my hometown is long gone (though another disciple opened a new shop that fits the bill beautifully). But I still get up for this race. I wake every morning for those three weeks in June and July to watch the sweeping aerial shots of the peloton snaking through sunflower fields, or the snow capped peaks of the Alps. The castle-filled vistas and the sun-bleached villages of Southern France are stunning. It’s enough to give in to a life of espresso and croissants, leisurely afternoons in a local bike shop, and a spritely old Englishman narrating my day.