Culture | Lean back and learn

How to watch the Tour de France from afar

Cyclists’ epic three weeks of pain can be a TV viewer’s delight

QUILLAN, FRANCE - JULY 10: The Peloton passing through a Sunflowers field during the 108th Tour de France 2021, Stage 14 a 183,7km stage from Carcassonne to Quillan / Landscape / @LeTour / #TDF2021 / on July 10, 2021 in Quillan, France. (Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images)

Media gurus like to divide entertainment into two types. The “lean-forward” sort demands attention and focus: think of whodunnits, video games or complicated, blink-and-you’ll-miss-something-crucial tv shows like “The Wire”. “Lean-back” entertainment, by contrast, is less demanding: the sort of thing you can dip into and out of at leisure.

Televised sports can also be allotted to one or other of these categories. Basketball, with its fast, end-to-end pace and high scores, is a lean-forward sport. Cricket—and especially the five-day Test version of the game—is a prime example of a lean-back one. But the ultimate lean-back tv sporting contests are surely the grand road-cycling tours.

The grandest of them all—the Tour de France—starts on July 1st. This year’s race covers 3,353km, roughly the same distance as between the American-Canadian border and Mexico City. To stay in contention riders will have to average around 40kph, day after day after day, on rural roads, up lung-busting mountain passes and even along sections of slippery, bone-shaking cobblestones, in a three-week festival of suffering.

The best way to experience the Tour is to be at the roadside, with a picnic (including wine, of course) amid the murmur of radios, chattering with other spectators, before a parade of lorries comes by and the riders whizz past for just a few seconds. But to get a view of the whole thing, the only way is on a screen—and the riders’ agonies do not necessarily televise well. There are moments of high drama: who can forget the spectator who took out most of the field early in last year’s race by leaning out of the crowd with a home-made sign? Still, there is no getting around the fact that as the competitors pant and sweat, nothing much happens, sometimes for hours at a time. To get the most out of the Tour, and turn ennui into enjoyment, the tv viewer must lean back.

As with Test cricket, good commentators deal with the slow pace of the action by embarking on long, rambling tangents. Done well, these can be charming. British viewers of last year’s Tour were treated to chats about the archaeological significance of some nearby cave paintings, musings on the architectural stylings of rural French churches and discussions on the finer points of village viticulture. While the cyclists ceaselessly lean forward, speeding through one département after another with little opportunity to take in their surroundings, good commentary can take recumbent viewers on something that really does come close to being a tour of France. On sunny days, the bucolic countryside is as much the star as the cyclists are.

And as with any sport, the more time you spend with it, the more you come to appreciate its intricacies. Cyclists ride in a closely packed group—the peloton—to conserve energy, in the same way that racing-car drivers take advantage of their opponents’ slipstreams. Sheltered by the riders at the front, those in the middle of the pack can get away with expending much less effort than they would otherwise have to, saving a great deal of valuable energy. Those at the front, meanwhile, take the full brunt of the wind resistance, and have to work harder—but are also better able to control the rest of the peloton, impede the progress of rivals and react to what is up ahead.

Being at the front also puts cyclists in a good position to make an “attack”, in which one or several try to break away from the pack. Sometimes that is a sincere attempt to put some distance between stronger riders and weaker ones, or to throw down a gauntlet to the race leader. Sometimes it is a doomed effort by no-hopers keen to get their team’s sponsors a few minutes in the spotlight. Towards the end of a stage, team members may form up at the front of the peloton, “leading out” a specialised sprinter who can make a dash for the finish.

In an attempt to liven things up the Tour offers several ways for cyclists to shine. The yellow jersey goes to the overall leader, the rider who has recorded the fastest time across all the stages so far. Tadej Pogacar, a Slovenian prodigy and the winner in 2020 and 2021, is favourite to end the race in the maillot jaune once more. But other prizes are available. The green jersey is worn by the rider who has accumulated most points, which can be earned in designated sprint sections, often (but not always) towards the end of a stage.

The polka-dot jersey, meanwhile, goes to the “King of the Mountains”, who does best on particularly steep parts of the course. Climbs are rated on a five-point scale; steeper sections carry most points. And the white jersey is worn by the best rider under 26. In his past two outings, besides winning the overall race, Mr Pogacar’s dominance was such that he bagged the polka-dot and white jerseys as well. There are even awards for “combativity”—a highly subjective measure of who has ridden most aggressively on a particular stage.

Most rewarding of all for the leant-back observer is the overarching storyline that unfolds over the three weeks of the race before the leader—by tradition, unchallenged—rolls along the Champs-Élysées in Paris to claim victory. Teams will alter their strategies in the face of bad weather, injury or the performance of other competitors. Riders who were serious contenders at the start may settle for accumulating stage wins; unfancied ones may, by luck or clever tactics, put themselves in contention.

Drugs are a constant sub-plot. The “heroic” era of the 1990s and 2000s, when doping was blatant and riders ascended mountain passes as if rocket-powered, are gone. But rumours and suspicion are not. Last year one team, Bahrain Victorious, had their hotel room raided mid-Tour by the police. This year the cops turned up at team-members’ homes just before the race began (no charges had been brought at the time of writing). Operation Bloodletting, run by the Austrian and German police, caught several blood-doping riders in 2019.

So if you’d like a way to pass the time on a warm summer’s day, give the Tour a try. Put it on a television in the background, or have it playing in a surreptitious browser window at work. Embrace its idiosyncrasies, keep half an eye on the slow-burning drama, and you might even find it becomes one of the highlights of the summer.

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