Netflix has struck gold: Tour de France: Unchained reviewed

I’m ideologically opposed to bicycles for all the obvious reasons: they don’t have lovely big nostrils which you can blow across gently or stroke inside to feel the soft, delicate skin; they can’t jump hedges; and the kit you’re expected to wear on them is quite hideous – not a smart, black, 18th-century-looking coat but vile, garish, deeply unflattering and unsexy Lycra.

Still, after watching a few episodes of Tour de France: Unchained, I’ve softened my position slightly. Say what you like about those infuriating, car-impeding, road-hogging cyclists but the ones who participate in the big international races don’t half have some balls. (Three actually, if the stories I hear about the effects of those uncomfy saddles are correct.) When they descend the windy mountain roads, they reach up to 100kph (62 mph in English). Imagine hitting the tarmac at that speed wearing little but a pair of swimming trunks.

In fact, we don’t need to imagine, as many of them have the scars to show it. And they’re so skinny (like thoroughbreds – which, with their long, gaunt faces and slender limbs, they resemble – they exist in a nervy state of highly strung racing fettle) that there isn’t an ounce of fat to cushion the blow. Then, the next day, unless they’re properly crippled, they have to get on their bike and do it all over again. And again. And again, till they’ve covered 2,200 miles in 23 days – at which point all but one of them will have lost.

The Tour de France is not, of course, the first sporting event that has been given the Netflix fly-on-the-wall, inside-scoop treatment. They tried it, very successfully with the still ridiculously watchable Formula 1: Drive To Survive. (I got ludicrously excited the other day when I saw Red Bull chief Christian Horner and his wife Geri Ginger Spice being trailed by a camera crew at Edgcote races, even though normally I care little for celebrities.)