Twenty-two days and one to go until they ride down the Champs-Elyseés. Alberto Contador takes a third Tour de France victory leading Andy Schleck by 39 seconds. I was cheering for Schleck to win this year, but he's young and will be back. A year's more training and practice for the time trial and 2011 may be his year.
I've missed the Outdoor Life Network's rebroadcast of the race this year, it being a lot more difficult to watch from 8:00AM until noon. Those three weeks of lying in front of the TV in the evening watching the wheels spin through the French countryside and mountains were too much of a good thing for North Americans, I guess. Some compensation was Rogers' cable trial of a system that enabled viewers to pull-up race and rider history and stats on screen in real time as the Tour progressed. Nice where technology is taking us.
Media coverage here in Toronto was, as usual, weak. There were the expected international new service stories about Lance Armstrong focused on renewed attempts in the USA to associate him with performance enhancing drugs and speculating on his ability to recover from a terrible day of spills and bike wrecks in the first week of the Tour. For those who want to know, Lance Armstrong is 39'40" back in 23rd place, proving it's pretty hard to make a come-back after 5 year's absence.
The best report I read was by Neil Davidson of The Canadian Press1 featuring comments on the Tour from Canadian cyclist Michael Barry (99th place out of 170). Barry was interviewed about how French spectators and sports fans respond to the race and how the thousands of near delirious fans strung out alone the roads and up and down the mountain passes affect the riders. Barry described six days he and his teammates trained in the Pyrenees, "When we climbed up in training, (we're) just climbing a mountain, with goats on the side of the road and a couple of cars might pass. It's tranquil and just beautiful and serene. And then (race day) you're climbing and you can't even really hear yourself think. People (are) screaming the whole way up. The Tour transforms the whole mountain. I catch glimpses of people on the roadside, but I definitely can't capture it all. Because I'm focused on the effort, just riding the bike, the road ahead".
The Tour transforms the mountains in another way, too. The road is awash in painted and chalked messages of encouragement to the riders. Weeks after the Tour, some amateur rider touring through the Pyrenees will come upon those messages scrawled on the road and he will hear the roar of the crowd and just when the mountain seems too much, even at a 10-15km/hr pace, he will find a reserve of strength to push his bike over the top. That is one more way the tour inspires millions of riders. Been there, done that.
One more day to celebrate the world's greatest athletes. And 49 weeks to wait until next year's Tour. Allez, allez!
- Tried unsucessfully to find this online. The Globe and Mail carried the report on July 22 but hasn't posted it to the website.↩
