Tour de France: why I am bidding au revoir to the greatest race of all | Sport
When I returned from reporting on the Tour de France for the first time I told my then boss, Martin Ayres, that I felt the Tour could be addictive. That was 27 years and 26 Tours ago, which speaks for itself. Now it is time to go through the journalistic equivalent of cold turkey. I have decided this is my last Tour reporting full-time for the Guardian, nearly a quarter of a century after I was first offered the job.
I will return to the race, I would hope, but not as a full-time, daily reporter, which is what I have been for 26 of the past 27 Tours â€" 20 of them completed in full â€" with all the stimulus, constraints, rewards and stress that role entails. I won’t be on the road next year; if and when I return it will be at a time of my choosing, to write about it in a different and equally rewarding way. I would hope it will be for the Guardian, but that particular decision can wait.
For the moment I would simply like to thank my sports editor, Owen Gibson, for the understanding he has shown about my need to draw the line where daily reporting on the Tour is concerned, as well as his predecessors Michael Averis, Ben Clissitt and Ian Prior.
Why draw that line now? The answer lies in those 27 years, virtually my entire adult working life, with the consequent impact on those around me of 26 Julys largely absent from home.
In one sense I started in the worst possible year: 1990, after probably the greatest Tour ever, the 1989 race: every Tour I have covered has been measured against that gold standard and found wanting. In terms of pure racing on the road, the plot line of climber against time triallist, the best one would be Marco Pantani’s battle with Jan Ullrich in 1998, but that is rightly remembered for very different reasons â€" the Festina scandal â€" and the legacies of both men are blurred, to put it as charitably as I can.
It is the human episodes which stick. A long, evening discussion with Robert Millar somewhere near Mont St-Michel in 1990 which led in a direct line to another, with Philippa York this year; a chance meeting with a yellow-jerseyed Thomas Voeckler en route to the start in 2004; a rest-day ride in 2006 up to Val d’Isère with Bradley Wiggins, who left me nearâ€'dead by the roadside. The best (and most bizarre) putdown: Luc Leblanc, in a hotel lobby the day after a dramatic stage win â€" no questions, I’m waiting for my suitcase.
There was a desperate search for Mark Cavendish after his first stage win at Chateauroux in 2008, to produce his ghosted column for the paper: it made the front page with the headline, Guardian Man wins stage in Tour. My favourite remains a time trial in 2001 or so, following Jacky Durand (who knows why): Dudu’s bars came loose, he had no team car with him, but we happened to have an allenâ€'key set â€" the best thing about the Tour being that such a thing could probably happen even now.
The bad is obvious: year after weary year of doping suspicion and scandal, never more toxic than during the Lance Armstrong era and immediately after, compared to which â€" and contrary to the views of many observers â€" the Sky/Froome era feels like a rather genteel village fete. The nadir was “Black Wednesday†during the nightmare Tour of 2007, with Michael Rasmussen going awol and Alexandr Vinokourov going positive. Just before dinner time, damn him.
As for the ugly, there have been many, many crashes to write about; some farcical (Sandy Casar and the dog, 2007), many terrifying (Johnny Hoogerland, 2011; Laurent Jalabert 1994). The fatal one, Fabio Casartelli in 1995, remains a sobering reminder of risks we rarely appreciate.
In 1990 I was one of five British writers covering the event. French, exclusively, was the language of the race. There were two British cyclists in the race. Compare and contrast with today’s anglophone race, dominated by the British.
On which note, if you had told me in 1990 that we would still be waiting for a French winner in 2017 I dread to think what I would have said.
The day had a gentle routine. Go to the start, park up ahead of the race. Hang around the team cars to find the cyclists. By and large you found who you wanted, because only one team had a bus â€" Sean Kelly’s PDM team. Drive ahead of the race up the route, trying not to knock down spectators, as far as Kilometre 92, where the Département des Hauts-de-Seine (No92) sponsored a daily buffet of local delicacies for the suiveurs, where you could ponder the merits of half-burnt sparrow gizzard on a stick.
Complaints were already proliferating about the gigantisme of the Tour, how its growth â€" more corporate guests, more vehicles, more spectators, more infrastructure â€" was making it lose its human touch, how television was favouring spectacle over sport. Compared to the early 1980s and the 1970s change had been extreme but, in truth, the Tour in 1990 was a large village, where now it is a small city. The Tour was more carefree, less managed, more homespun. Now it is massively more diffuse, with an epic and intimidating level of security, new since last year.
Its size has led to a sense of distance from the race itself and the cyclists. Press rooms can be miles from the finish and most days the only contact with those who actually race is via a video link or a small screen. This year’s single drive down the route was an exception because there was no motorway alternative, a somewhat wistful reminder of a more intimate past.
What is harder now is to marry the sense of the Tour as a whole with the daily need for a reporter to know what happens in the race, a requirement that has become more urgent since television coverage moved beyond evening highlights.
The race has become a more demanding, more intense place to work, but that work is as satisfying as it ever was, probably more so. The stories feel bigger and have more impact; since 1998 and the Armstrong years the Tour has acquired true global status, magnified in the past 10 years by the immediacy of the internet and the intimacy of social media. It remains a gloriously entertaining and diverse month-long road trip; being able to share some of the fun via Twitter has made it more so.
It has been a good race this year: massive events such as Peter Sagan’s eviction, a wealth of attacking, and a tense â€" if slightly sterile â€" battle for the yellow jersey. It had its undercurrent of controversy but we are used to that now.
I am far from looking at the race with the “tired eyes†Jacques Goddet said reporters displayed when they slammed his 1968 Tour. And that, as much as anything, is why now is time for something else in July.
Most memorable stages
1994 Lille Prologue
An epochal moment for a very likeable bike rider in the most unromantic surroundings â€" a half-built Euralille â€" which was at the beginning of the train of events which has led us to Team Sky and Chris Froome. A complete shock for those who did not know Chris Boardman’s potential; and it also bookended the Greg LeMond era.
1995 Pau Stage 16
The slow-motion tribute to Fabio Casartelli, a multicoloured cortege winding through the Pyrenees. One of the rare moments when the Tour’s peloton showed solidarity and united as one. The magnitude of Casartelli’s death cannot be overstated. A few days later Lance Armstrong was shown in his best light too, winning the stage to Brive and dedicating it to his late teamâ€'mate.
(From left) Frenchmen Richard Virenque and Laurent Jalabert, Spaniard Miguel Indurain and US teammates Frankie Andreu and Lance Armstrong observe a minute’s silence before the start of the 16th stage of the 1995 Tour de France in memory of Italian Fabio Casartelli, who died the day before. Photograph: Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images
1996 Les Arcs Stage 7
In terms of multiple incidents and crazy stories, possibly the single most eventful stage in the last halfâ€'century at least. The end of the Miguel Indurain era, Boardman and Laurent Jalabert, cracking dramatically, Johan Bruyneel going into a ravine, Stéphane Heulot abandoning in tears while in yellow â€" and Indurain being given a time penalty for illegal feeding.
2001 Pontarlier Stage 8
A left-fielder; run off in belting rain with a 14-rider group gaining 35 minutes, upending the race, technically putting all their fellows outside the time limit, and giving Stuart O’Grady the yellow jersey â€" two stages later it changed hands again, to the unknown Frenchman François Simon. Off-the-wall bonkersness.
2007 London Prologue
The first hint that cycling might end up where it has done today, as a national sport and pastime. The stage was not memorable per se but the people were â€" zillions of them, a foretaste of the scenes at so many British bike races since. Plus, I got to be interviewed on French radio along with a Beatles tribute band and a bulldog, and was able to ride the wrong way round Trafalgar Square on closed roads. Because I could.
0 Response to "Tour de France: why I am bidding au revoir to the greatest race of all | Sport"
Posting Komentar