Of course I watched. I always watch, despite the niggling doubts over how much of it was alchemy as well as physiology. The Tour de France remains a beguiling dance of character and colour, even on days like Sunday when the Normandy skies are submarine grey and northern France appears to have swallowed half its summer intake of water in a day.
Part of me misses covering the race, being absorbed directly into its DNA, with the valuable ASO route book hogging the back seat of a hire car next to a stale baguette and unopened packets of madeleine cakes – which quickly become a staple part of most people covering the Tour. But then I come to my senses. For while covering 3,500 kilometres across three weeks is the ultimate test for the world’s best riders, it also a considerable challenge for anyone who tags along.
In the space of a sentence on Sunday, the former British cyclist Rob Hayles hailed the race as a “fantastic circus” and “a logistical nightmare”. He was right on both counts.
Before my first proper Tour in 2013 I read a chapter in The Cycling Anthology: Tour de France Special Edition, written by Brendan Gallagher, which warned that for journalists: “The Tour de France is primarily a white-knuckled rally ride around France and neighbouring countries chasing deadlines and stories, searching for Wi-Fi hotspots and petrol stations on remote mountainsides at midnight and praying that your hotel, booked absent-mindedly on the internet six months earlier, actually exists.”
The intrinsic truth in Gallagher’s words became rapidly clear on my first day in Corsica – when trying to find my small farm B&B in the hills outside Porto-Vecchio involved increasingly forlorn trips up and down the same long stretch of hill, multiple Gallic shrugs and a hand gesture which is probably best not described in a family newspaper. Having no sat nav or a badly scaled map from my travel company only added to the pain.
That was only the start. Most people remembered stage one in 2013 for the Orica GreenEdge team bus getting wedged under the finish line and a spectacular crash with six kilometres remaining that took out half the peloton. But that Saturday evening stays in my mind, too, because I spent hours trying to navigate around closed roads and one-way streets to find the Bonaparte Hotel – only to discover when I got there that I was supposed to be at the Hotel Napoleon across town.
To play it safe, I decided that for the third stage, from Ajaccio to Calvi, I would follow the route of the race. I left early and was enjoying one of the stunningly scenic drives over four category climbs and roads that twisted and contorted like Munch’s Scream along the Corsican coast, when I realised that every petrol station I was passing was shut – and that I was rapidly running out of fuel. I nursed my car along the road into Calvi with the gauge at empty, daring not to touch the brakes and convinced I was going to grind to a halt on the course and have to be towed away. I have never been happier to pay the extortionate refuelling charge when finally dropping the hire car off.
Things at least went more smoothly in 2014 – until stage nine when I was allowed down a side route for official vehicles. It should have provided a fast route to the finish. In reality I spent the best part of six hours trying to arrive, via numerous category one climbs and dead ends, because I belatedly discovered I had the wrong sticker on my car.
Everyone who covers the Tour – and there are 2,000 journalists who do so each year – has similar stories. And so do the hundreds of staff from the race organisers ASO, as well as a 50-man motorcycle squadron from the Republican Guard and the 12 full-time police.
It involves a tremendous feat of planning, including booking 40,000 bed-nights in 210 hotels for the riders and their teams and finding spaces for the caravan of 170 cars and trucks which carry 600 people representing 35 brands and hurl free tat at spectators before the riders turn up.
Most people following the race, including journalists, will not see much of the live action. Most of the time we are lucky; we get to watch the biggest sporting events from the best seats. But at the Tour we are cooped up in a press room, watching coverage on French TV before the mad dash at the finish to wade to the Team buses and into the scrum of people looking to get a word with riders. In 2013 it was only on the Tour’s fourth stage, a time trial around Nice, that I finally got to see some actual racing on the roads not on TV.
And there are the rest days which are anything but. Often they can involve a four-hour drive at the crack of dawn to get to a team hotel for an interview, as well as a desperate search for a launderette.
Yet those moments are worth it for the good times and immense camaraderie and the sense of being so close to one of the most intriguing and demanding sporting events of the year. For most people covering the Tour, though, it is not only about the Bike – to borrow from the title of Lance Armstrong’s first book. It is about the car and so much else besides, too.
