Le Tour

Being a calendric sort of person occasions such as the solstices and the equinoxes always add a frisson of excitement to my year. But the annual event that frissons me the most is Le Tour. France’s national bike race. The Tour de France. And it seems I’m not alone in my enjoyment of watching slightly underweight men race bikes around Western Europe. Cycling is big. It is the new golf, as I heard someone say the other day. Indeed, cycling’s so big there are Australians now complaining about free-to-air Ashes coverage, as it is interrupting their TDFing. And the reason for this?

Unlike golf or cricket the Tour is hypnotic. One could assume it is all those wheels and pedals going around and around, but there’s more to it than that. The Tour seems to encapsulate a broader, more complete Frenchness – and SBS should be congratulated for this.

Firstly, whilst France is all about smoking, camping, and bicycles, it is also about food and wine. And Gabriel Gate’s Le Taste Le Tour is a TDF highlight. In the same way Marlon Brando became more like (and more of) Marlon Brando as each year rolled past, so too does Gabriel’s accent. At the current rate he will soon be speaking a mangled kind of Franglais neither a Frenchman nor an Englishman (or Tony Blair or Inspector Clouseau’s manservant Kato) can understand.

There’s also a strong travelogue component to Le Tour, and I love that angle most when it is practised by the warm-up commentator, Matthew Keenan. He is an encyclopedia when it comes to the race and the riders, but for reasons unclear he every now and then breaks his race line to inform the viewer about a chateau. “And the race is now going past Le Chateau Blancnoir, which was… built… by the… patron of Tarbes… Phillipe… Le Coeur… Rouge… in… 1382 when the chateau was… built.”

Keenan brings none of the tension and excitement of Le Tour to viewers like the two-headed commentating monster does, however: Phil Leggett and Paul Sherwen. They make the difficult look easy. It is probably impossible, in lay terms, to describe how these two blokes so effortlessly add such informed voices to the racing. Nevertheless, I’ll have a stab at it.

Leggett: “And here comes the Belgian champion Von Shlunk! He’s burst out of the peleton and he’s really putting the hammer down!”
Sherwen: Yes he’s put the hammer down, bursting out of the peleton, and it’s the man, Phil, I thought would do extremely well on this stage – the Belgain champion – Von Shlunk.”

This sort of language makes the rhetoric and oratory of Winston Churchill sound like an unsupervised kindergarten playground.

As much as we can bank on these re-occurring themes within the Tour every year, there are also moments peculiar to each Tour which seem to burst like fireworks and dominate Tour thinking for a few days. This year that’s what’s happened with echeloning.

I think the Sherwen half of the monster got the word out first, but then the Leggett half started applying it to anything that looked semi-vaguely-diagonal. The team cars were pretty soon echeloning along, as were spectators, helicopters, and the odd chateau. Interviewers started using the word in every question. Even the riders themselves began breathlessly spitting it out. At the coffee shop the next morning I’m pretty sure I heard a fellow customer slip “echelon” into his order for 250 grams of Free-Trade Guatemala Espresso Blend… The coffee roaster didn’t even blink an eyelid.

Vive le Tour.