I’ve spent a few enjoyable hours watching the Tour de France on the magical picture box. The Tour de France, for those who don’t know it, consists of a couple of hundred maniacally fit young men riding bicycles around France. Not just Paris, or Lyon, but on roads to little villages like St-Michel-de Maurienne, or Tignes. You’ve never heard of those little places and neither have I.
Often enough the roads are in the French Alps and go straight up the side of a 6,000 foot high mountain, then plummet down the other side at a 50 degree angle. There are crashes, pedals entangled in spokes, riders flying off over the guardrails and multi-cycle pileups that seem to go on for hours, in a tumbling collection of arms, elbows, legs, knees, heads, spokes and wheels. You can’t quite hear it, but you know there is extensive swearing, in several languages, going on as well.
Not that I’m watching for the crashes, as I have fallen off my share of bicycles and still have some little pebbles of gravel that come to the surface of my skin from time to time. What I am watching is not the cyclists or the race.
There are two fascinating sidebars to the Tour de France. The first is the cameraperson who is standing on the back seat of a motorcycle, trolling along beside the cyclists, taking closeups of the sweat pouring off the riders as their leg tendons and muscles bulge like a collection of snakes in spandex and sponsor logos.
The second sidebar are the fans. Apparently people take their vacations to drive for a day and half to camp at the side of an obscure road, near an unremarkable village, to watch two hundred sweaty men cycle by them once. Some fans have their favourite team or rider and insist on painting the entire bodies and camper trailers in the colours of Rabobank or Discovery Channel, as a tribute to their heroes.
The cameraperson, I am certain, is insane. If you would like to simulate what he or she is doing, find a big, hard ball, like a softball. Put the ball on a kitchen chair. Place a short wood board across the ball. Put a fourteen pound weight on your right shoulder and close your left eye. Climb up on the chair, balance on the board on the ball and try to aim the weight on your shoulder at one corner of the TV and leave it there.
Just to add to the fun, be on your cellphone at the same time, talking to someone who has consumed too much coffee and is chain-smoking Gitanes in a control room in Paris. Now, make the kitchen chair go 45 kilometers an hour, mere inches from a group of cyclists while going down an 8% grade. Oh, there will be helicopters flying just a few meters away to deafen you. You have to trust the motorcycle driver is not drunk, depressed, high or getting over a particularly nasty love affair gone bad, with the unprotected, thousand-foot alpine drops looking so appealing.
Now add five dozen tiny European cars, with seventy-five bicycles lashed to each of their roofs, dodging in an out of the two hundred cyclists, honking their horns, screaming in a dozen languages and passing lunch to the riders, who glibly throw their empty water bottles at the heads of the spectators. Meanwhile your brokenhearted motorcycle driver is sobbing at the sorrow of losing his love Pauline to a macon from Vierville who quotes Sartre and makes passionate love to her on the dining room table Sunday mornings after a meaningful repas of bread, cheese and eggs lightly fried in olive oil.
Then there are the spectators who ebb and flow off the side of the road, trying to touch the riders, flying their flags and colours, proffering water, while waving, screaming and taking pictures with their cellphones. Your motorcycle driver, Jean-Etienne, must weave between them, while you perch in the air pointing a camera at the riders.
Then you are on the downhill descent, watching the speeds climb to 70 or 80 kilometers an hour, feeling the wind from the speed and the nearby helicopters pushing you left, right, back and forward, as the heavy, overbalanced motorcycle must squirt around a 180 degree bend on a road that is half-gravel, half pavement, coated with paper cups and water bottles, at 60 kilometers an hour, while dodging cyclists, spectators and signage.
At the end of a stage, the cyclists look like spent tissues, crumpled and wet. The cameraperson, I suspect is taken to a padded room and allowed a forty-five minute soundless howl of soul-scarifying terror that makes Munch’s The Scream, look like a child’s birthday card, complete with cartoon puppy. After he or she stops twitching, they are injected with something to calm them for a week or two.
Jean-Etienne, the camera motorcycle driver, disappears to a shadowy corner of the media pen with a bottle, his memories of the vivacious Pauline and sad Johnny Halliday songs on his iPod.
The spectators? They pack up their tents, lawn chairs and caravans and fight the endless kilometers of traffic away from the Tour de France. Each driver hunched over his or her cellphone reviewing the blurry, poorly framed snaps of George Hincapie or Michel Rasmussen in the maillot jaune. You can just see the shoulder of the leader, behind fourteen other riders, dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, including a fine mist of refined, high-performance athlete sweat.
And you think NASCAR is madness? Bill France and stock car boys have nothing on these folks who cover, participate and spectate in, on and around the Tour de France.
RoadDave 