A Particle of Boredom

At the Bois de Vincennes early yesterday, Eric and Samuel were training hard. Wearing tight, brightly coloured Lycra stretched over their paunches, they had stopped for a quick gulp of water. Their bikes had been momentarily abandoned beside the cycling track that snakes round the huge park in the east of Paris.

“Blame the Tour [de France],” Eric, 44, said. “It’s inspirational. It makes you want to get on your bike and ride like a lunatic.” For Samuel, 47, a civil engineer, cycling is “a way of being. It is nothing to do with sponsorship, television, all the razzmatazz,” he said. “It is about sportsmen, the open road, the air and the countryside. It is about France.”

Sadly, the two men admitted, the race is not about French riders winning, at least not since 1985. Though one of the 30-odd French riders (out of 180) won a stage on Friday — take a bow, Brice Feillu, 23 — and Thomas Voeckler from near Orléans did the same earlier in the week, no Frenchman is expected to win overall.

Instead this week the battle for the lead will continue between the two favourites, the Spaniard Alberto Contador and his teammate Lance Armstrong, the American who beat cancer to keep riding and has come back from a four-year retirement to try for his eighth victory.

Even L’Équipe, the French sports newspaper, acknowledged that “no French riders right now can imagine being high in the overall rankings” when the Tour finishes in Paris on July 26.

Some commentators compare the weakness with the British failure to win Wimbledon. Speak to the weekend cyclists of the 24 years of hurt and a theme emerges: drugs. The French do not take them and the others do. Most common is the allegation, for which no evidence is offered, that Armstrong uses performance-enhancing drugs. The second, again without any evidence, is that the entire Astana team in which Armstrong is riding uses drugs. A third is that, unlike all other riders, French cyclists have not used drugs since the major scandals that saw entire teams arrested in the late 1990s. And, finally, non-French teams force their riders to use drugs because they are sponsored by multinational businesses that want a return on their investment. Again, no evidence.

Bernard Hinault, the last French rider to win the Tour de France, explains it differently. “The French don’t train,” he said. “The only way to do it would be to block part of their salary and only let them have it if they win. Or hold a knife to their throats. And the French take as many drugs or as few as anyone else.”

Others say there is a dearth of young talent as fewer and fewer young French people take up cycling.

For journalist Béatrice Houchard, author of “Should the Tour be stopped?”, this has its roots in the growing gap between the France seen in the Tour de France “with its beautiful mountains, little country lanes and villages with their bells ringing as the riders go by” and the real France of today.

“The Tour is a kind of national festival, a sort of slightly nostalgic annual rendezvous for the whole country. The cycling is secondary for many people,” she said. “When I asked the organisers why the Tour never went through a rundown suburb on the outskirts of Paris they said it would be too difficult to close off the traffic. They don’t say that about Marseille, Monaco or the Champs Elysées.”

Most of the media attention is focused on Armstrong, 37, described by Le Point magazine last week as “the man the French love to hate”.

Though many admire his determination and courage, his battle against illness and his talent — according to a recent survey, 72 per cent of French people say they are not upset by his taking part in the Tour — many do not. After announcing his plan to participate in this year’s race, Armstrong told reporters that he feared for his safety. A cartoon in Le Monde caricatured the prevailing mix of ignorance and vitriol: “Lance Armstrong is unbelievable … He walked on the moon, he survived cancer, he won the Tour de France seven times, he revolutionised jazz … and you are telling me he isn’t on drugs?”

Armstrong has consistently denied accusations that he has used drugs to boost his performance but, although the cyclist has never failed a properly conducted dope test, France’s sports minister, Roselyne Bachelot, said he would be under special scrutiny.

“There really needs to be a very, very active fight against doping,” she said. “The controls will be multiplied and I tell Lance Armstrong that he will be particularly, particularly, particularly monitored.”

Feillu, the hero of Friday, is determined to wear the yellow jersey all the way to Paris on July 26. But France is not holding its breath. — Guardian