Endless Cycle: Watching the Post-Armstrong Tour de France

On Wednesday, July 11, the popular television sports network known as ESPN held its 20^th annual ESPY Awards (Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly) at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles. This event was purposefully scheduled on this date to fill the void on one of the very few days of the year in which the professional playing fields of the United States are left entirely fallow. No major American professional sports league held any contests on this day, due in part to the fact that Major League Baseball was in the midst of its annual All-Star Break. (Major League Soccer did in fact sponsor one match, as Toronto FC defeated the Vancouver Whitecaps, but this, of course, took place in Canada).  Holding the ESPYs on a sports-less day makes good sense, as it ensures that superstars of the sporting world will be available to receive their awards in person (and smile on camera above an ESPN logo), and it guarantees the fans who would otherwise be watching the Astros and Cubs battle it out will be available to tune in. While this event may not yet possess the same cachet as the Oscars, the athletes in attendance show that it is indeed a legitimate big-time affair and a fitting occasion for Americans to take a step back and reflect on what has transpired in sports over the past year.

Half a world away, just hours before the kickoff of this grand fête of sport-soaked retrospection, 33-year-old Thomas Voeckler won Stage 10 in the 99^th edition of the Tour de France in impressive fashion. Voeckler, a Frenchman and member of Team Europcar, took the day with a finishing time of 4 hours, 46 minutes and 26 seconds, besting the day’s runner-up by nearly three minutes. While many Americans were busy lamenting the fact there were ‘no sports’ to watch on July 11, 2012, 175 cyclists made the nearly 195-kilometer trek from the city of Mâcon, up the towering Col du Grand Colombier in the Jura Mountains, and into the placid commune of Bellegarde-sur-Valserine.

In the grand scheme of things, Stage 10 will not go down as an especially memorable stretch of the 2012 Tour. It lacked the excitement of crowning a new overall race leader, as British rider Bradley Wiggins maintained the yellow jersey for yet another day. It lacked the chaotic drama of Stage 14, in which some ‘hooligans’ tossed tacks onto the road, wreaking havoc on rubber tires and leaving last year’s winner, Cadel Evans, desperately searching for new wheels in the middle of the race. Yet, the juxtaposition of cycling’s only name-brand event against America’s ‘day off’ from sports underlies the fact that Americans seem increasingly divorced from the Tour de France, even when it may be one of the most engaging sporting events in the world.

American interest in cycling, while never in danger of dampening the nation’s economic productivity level, has certainly seen better days, due almost exclusively to the absence of seven-time Tour champion Lance Armstrong. Armstrong occupied a unique space in American sport at his prime—he had survived a harrowing battle with cancer, launched an ultra-successful brand in Livestrong, and was romantically involved with Sheryl Crow. The fact that he completely dominated his sport didn’t hurt either. Armstrong temporarily retired after his 2005 Tour victory, returning again in 2009 (finishing third overall) and 2010 (finishing 23^rd) before leaving the sport for good. While there was a ratings boon in the U.S. when Armstrong was around, it has been difficult in the wake of his retirement to get many American TV sets on the Tour, especially without another homegrown star ready to take his place. While American Tejay Van Garderen has remained in the overall top 10 since the early stages of this year’s Tour (and may take home the white jersey as ‘best young rider’), he has a long way to go before his name reaches ‘household’ status. Accusations of and positive tests for doping also have not helped the stature of the sport on this side of the pond. Americans are exhausted from the airing of dirty laundry from baseball’s steroid era, so it’s understandable that they wouldn’t want to get too attached to a sport where similar drug-related issues have recently run rampant. Just a couple of days ago, in fact, one of the sport’s ‘stars’ from Luxembourg, Frank Schleck, (who was 12^th overall at the time) was forced to withdraw from the Tour after testing positive for a banned diuretic. As a result of these kinds of occurrences, a dark cloud will likely linger over the sport for years to come.

Even with these challenges and the absence of notable American interest, the Tour is still an incredible and unique event on the sporting calendar. This year’s edition began in Liège, Belgium and will end, as it usually does, at the Champs-Elysées in Paris this Sunday. When they finish, the riders will have covered a total of 3,496.9 kilometers (2,173 miles)—a distance equivalent to driving from Wilmington, NC to Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s an incredible feat of physical prowess just to finish the course, putting your body through the hell of hours of competitive cycling, up mountains and down mountains, day in and day out for three weeks. Those who can do it better than anyone else should be lauded as members of a very elite class of athletes in the world (so long as they weren’t cheating).

Thanks to the NBC Sports Network, American viewers have had the opportunity to watch live footage of each day’s stage every morning (or they can come back later for one of the countless repeats featured throughout the day). Watching the Tour is unlike seeing any other sporting event, largely because of the extreme emphasis on natural landscape in its coverage. While other sports—read: golf—have idyllic vistas and prominently feature natural scenery as part of the experience (think of iconic settings at Augusta National and Pebble Beach), no televised sporting event spends more time zooming out to take in pastures, mountains, brooks, and coastlines than the Tour de France. Some of the most breathtaking moments of the event have nothing to do with people or bicycles, but viewing the world from above, looking down on a medieval church or out to an endless expanse of wheat fields, or to a quaint French village. While the Goodyear Blimp may provide a stunning view of downtown Nashville during a Titans game, this hardly compares to the sight of the crystal blue Mediterranean as cyclists approach Cap d’Agde in the South of France, as they did in this year’s 13^th stage.

Fan interaction is another point of interest in the Tour, an element that often rides the line between Pacers-Pistons ‘Malice at the Palace’ fan involvement and a typically staid golf crowd. The streets of France (as well as the stretches in Belgium and Switzerland) are lined with boisterous spectators wielding signs and flags, donning animal costumes and crazy hats. While some can be spotted perched upon mountain tops or hanging out of windows, fans are mostly right on top of the riders. In some stretches, people are mere inches from the athletes they cheer for, clapping violently in the cyclists’ faces as they pass or running alongside a particular rider until their legs give out. Part of the lore of the Tour is built around tales of spectators colliding with riders (intentional or not), throwing them off bikes and directly altering the outcome of the event. The aforementioned tacking of the roads and ensuing melee in this year’s Tour demonstrates how much spectator interaction can impact a race. The close proximity of fans, along with the ways in which rain and wind can affect the course, gives the Tour an unpredictability that many other sports lack. Sure, the favorites may still come out on top in the end, but a lot of interesting stuff can happen along the way.

It seems unlikely that Americans will ever truly love cycling, no matter how good Tejay Van Garderen turns out to be. There are idiosyncrasies that may make it hard to follow (a complicated jersey color classification system, wtf is a ‘peloton,’ etc.) and it’s never easy to motivate large numbers of people to watch a live sporting event before they head out the door for work on a Monday morning. Nevertheless, the Tour de France is more than worthy of a few minutes of our time, especially in the steamy, drowsy daze of July. At least it will give you something to do while you wait for NFL training camp to start.