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Caleb D. Spencer


Wasting July

An encomium to the Tour de France.

Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living! … Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well, now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it … and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!
—Jack London

As London delightedly suggests, bicycling has a long association with human flourishing, but what may be less well known by many Books & Culture readers is the delight that can be had simply watching others get down to it. Road bike racing, like cricket, golf, and tennis, is often confusing and even at times downright bizarre to the uninitiated. And to complicate matters, just as International Test matches, the Masters, and Wimbledon have even stranger customs then their sporting equivalents, so also the Tour de France, the pinnacle of cycle racing, has its share of oddities, intensifying a new viewer's sense of disorientation. Still, having spent large segments of the last decade of Julys watching le Tour, I'd suggest there is not only hope, but delight for those who can persevere in their viewing.

It is unfortunate the Tour is too little watched and even less enjoyed in the U.S. (though viewership and interest appear to be growing, despite the Armstrong doping debacles of the last few year). I think the value of cycling races is more than aesthetic, even if the sustained and indisputable beauty of a race that courses past some of the most glorious scenery and monuments to human ingenuity is profound. But it's also a lesson in character formation. To be sure, the Tour is beautiful: like a serpentine colorful river coursing across France, the Tour is a carnival, part spectacle, part sport, with upwards of 200 riders, 22 teams, hundreds of vehicles, before, after and around the riders, and literally millions of spectators lining the roads throughout France over the three weeks of the race. Helicopters follow and record every moment, as do a flotilla of motorcycle cameramen—indeed, at times they are just inches from the riders, even occasionally colliding with them. The race provides a spectacular visual tour of rural France and some lovely glimpses of Paris and its environs on the last stage, ending as it traditionally has on a route that passes the Palace of Versailles, along the Seine near Notre Dame, to the Louvre, Jardin des Tuileries, onto the Place de Concorde up to the Arc de Triomphe before finishing on the cobbles facing again the Arc.

And yet even with the clear visual power of the race, I've found many friends and family somewhat baffled by it. I can't say I blame them: I spent quite a few hours with the broadcast before it became clear to me just what was going on. One difficulty is that this is both a team sport (9 to a side) and an individual competition for the coveted "Yellow Jersey" worn by the overall leader each day (the "Maillot jaune" in French or the "Golden Fleece" in the slang of NBC Sports' British commentators). The overall winner is the rider with the lowest time at the conclusion of the final stage in Paris (although traditionally the Yellow Jersey is not contested on the last day, and the first half of the stage is a semi-parade complete with champagne toasts and innumerable photo ops along the race route before it reaches Parisian streets and the final circuits speed things up).

Covering 2200 miles in the quickest time requires not only a strong rider but also an equally strong team, thanks both to the laws of physics and the dynamics of the race. Crudely a bicycle's speed is determined by the power input matched against the wind and rolling resistance it meets. Of the two, wind resistance is by far the biggest obstacle for a cyclist, and so aerodynamics is important to the race. Here is where a Yellow Jersey contender's team becomes essential: a contender's team works to shield him from the wind throughout as much of the race as they can (this is why the teams are often together, especially at key moments of the race such as during climbs or near the finale each day). Teams aid a Yellow Jersey defense by shielding the leaders from the wind while unprotected riders do the work of the peloton (the term for the large group of riders in the race) and they also chase back the nearly daily small group of riders (the "break away") who roll off the front each stage. Thus while the Yellow Jersey winner is always a very strong rider, no individual rider could ever win the Tour de France without an impressively strong team.

And yet, confusing things a bit more, it is seldom the Yellow Jersey winner's team who wins the team classification of the Tour. This classification is awarded to the team with three lowest combined times and is demarked by yellow rider numbers in the daily stages and a presentation at the end of the race. Recently this competition has also featured some teams wearing yellow helmets while leading the competition, just as the leader of the individual competition is often resplendent in a yellow team kit, including a custom yellow bike, with matching yellow accouterments (sunglasses, shoes, gloves, and so on). At the Tour, yellow is the color of status!

Unless, that is, you are one of the sprinters, the riders whose skill and strength is covering the last 100 yards of the race at the highest speeds: for these sprinters, green is the coveted color and the rider who is winning this points-based classification wears the Green Jersey. Sprinters in the Tour are not like track sprinters. They must cover 120 miles before they sprint, carrying their heavier bodies over hills and through the wind, and then come out and charge down the final yards of a stage for victory. They are more like runners who sprint in the final yards of a marathon than pure sprinters like Usain Bolt. The jersey's points are awarded throughout daily intermediate sprints and at the conclusion of flatter stages, where the sprinters are expected to feature. Sometimes, though, the pesky breakaway manages to hold off the sprinters' teams; indeed, some of the most exciting stages are those in which the sprinters' teams wait to reel in the breakaway until the final kilometers, as there is always the chance that the punished riders who have been off the front of the group for hours will make it to the end and deny the charging sprinters.

The Polka Dot and White Jersey competitions round out the Tour's classifications, awarded, respectively, to the rider who earns the most climbing points by reaching the tops of hills and mountains ("King of the Mountain" or "KOM" is common parlance for this competition) and to the rider with the lowest time who is under 26 years of age. It is rare but possible to hold the Yellow Jersey and the White Jersey at the same time, as Andy Schleck of Luxemburg has done in recent tours. Actually it is possible to have all four jerseys at the same time, but in those instances where a rider leads more than one competition, the second place rider in the competition wears the jersey.

While the presence of these competitions within what seems like a single race may confuse new viewers, the sublime suffering of the strings of riders pounding across the roads, shown in the brilliant high-definition images of the cameras, keep many returning. And there is also the spectacle of the inevitable crashes of the Tour, as when one of the eldest and most loved riders in the peloton, a German named Jens Voigt, crashed spectacularly descending the Col du Petit-Saint-Bernard in the 2009 Tour. The first week of the race, before the classifications start to really take shape, is especially crash-ridden, with pile ups at roundabouts, at the finishes, even at times during the push up small climbs as teams contest for coveted space at the front of the race and get their Yellow Jersey contender in position.

Violent and injury-producing spectacle is not, however, what sets the race apart from other sporting events. Instead, in many ways it's the race's amazing duration and, perhaps paradoxically, general lack of action that makes the Tour (and the other cycling "Grand Tours," the Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España) unique. While the World Cup continues this month, complaints about the lack of action in international football matches will persist, but, if soccer is mildly boring to the untrained eye, a Tour stage can easily seem like three to four televised hours of colorful, spandex-matched cycling with five to ten minutes of excitement tacked on at the end—the kind of thing best watched in a recap on YouTube, if at all. Of course I could explain all the action that is happening in the various competitions of the race in the seeming inaction of a stage, but I won't, because it is this very tedium I find so delightful. For so much of the time in the race, nothing is happening—riders chat, smile, eat, even stop (off camera, usually) to go to the bathroom, and the race continues. But at any moment a crash or an attack can disrupt the tranquility, riders who were chatting amiably become enemies as they fight for position for their leader, or a mechanical problem to a bike can leave a contender stranded waiting for their team car and mechanic to come and get them up and running as the race cruises away before them.

In short, in the midst of the ordinary and long passage of the race something extraordinary inevitably occurs. Here the Tour differs from the formalized and routinized space and time of so much of contemporary sport: the very things that most sporting events are designed to constrain in space (through fields, courts, touch lines, end zones, 6-yard boxes, creases, pitches, infields, etc.) and in time (quarters, halves, injury time, etc.), the Tour blows apart. As a reader and film viewer I have long been intrigued by the power of stories and movies to organize and compress human life, often by leaving out the very things that we spend most of our time doing—there's little sleeping or working in novels or films, even fewer diaper, oil, or furnace-filter changes. But the Tour is different: here time passes and not much happens, at least not much that seems to change the race, but just as the epiphany or disaster ever lurks in the next moment of the novel or film, so in the ordinariness of the Tour—its long-telling and thick description—something is always just about to happen. Such faithfulness to the task in the absence of any obvious gain or consequence—pedaling with an intent to have it matter even as experience has taught you that most of moments haven't in the past—is both inspiring and unusual in sports' immanent teleologies. I have found this eschatological approach to the Tour—this waiting expectantly—transformative as it mirrors so much of my own life experience: pedaling through life in moments that often seem unimportant but hold the pregnant possibility of an event breaking out at any second changing everything.

Thus as sports have become increasingly central and the warrants for viewing or participating in them have become increasingly unnecessary, we should remember that the identity and dispositions created by not only our participation but also our viewing may not be the same. Entering into the complexity, confusion, spectacle, suffering, and hope built into multi-stage cycle racing may help us to become the kind of flourishing persons who wait patiently for something significant to happen, participating with the full expectation that the idle minutes passing by in a beautiful spectacle may just be enough, even if nothing else happens. Vive le Tour!

Caleb D. Spencer is assistant professor of English at Azusa Pacific University.

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