Spectator Sport

27 June 2009

Tour de force

This year’s Tour is the most intriguing for years thanks to the return to the fray of the seven-times winner Lance Armstrong. The 37-year-old Texan has had his ups and downs — besides surviving cancer, he did the dirty to the lovely Sheryl Crowe, though he bounced back with a jolly good performance as himself in that major classic Dodgeball.

He should be a hero the world over, yet in the land of his greatest triumphs he remains a highly contentious figure. The French never took to Armstrong — in their eyes he was chippy, graceless and too much of a machine to engage their emotions. He could speak the language but often chose not to, and for this particular foreigner to dominate this celebration of all things French only brought home to them their continued failure to produce a genuine Tour challenger of their own.

No Frenchman has won the Tour since Bernard Hinault took the last of his five titles in 1985, and there’s no prospect of a home-grown winner in the forseeable future. And the rosbifs? Well, this is a golden age of British cycling, as those Beijing golds testified. The road of course is very different from the track, but we can still offer up the world’s best sprint finisher in the amazing Manxman Mark Cavendish, who will be looking to match or even improve upon his incredible four stage wins last year.

This is a clockwise year, so they’ll be doing the Pyrenees first and then the Alps, with a real sting in the tail on the penultimate day when the riders tackle the legend of a climb that is Mont Ventoux, rising more than 6,000ft above the sun-baked Provençal countryside. How hard is this climb? Well, it was here, on the fearsome, baking moonscape of its upper slopes, that Britain’s greatest ever cyclist, Tom Simpson, collapsed and died in the 1967 Tour. But then again, his body was not free of illegal substances...