Tour de France 2012

[Deleted]

I have decided that I need to see a stage of the Tour de France this year, since I haven't seen one outside of Paris for at least 5 years. I was trying to see what I could arrange at the same time as my visit to Avignon, but it is just too far and too complicated to make it to the Pyrénées for the spectacular mountain stages there.

So as of today, I decided that I would go to see the stage at Abbeville at the beginning of the Tour. Perhaps not very spectacular, but within easy reach of Paris.

Obviously I will come back to this thread when the Tour approaches.

[tod2]

With the Tour De France starting this Saturday 30th June I thought I would share some anecdotal snippets of information from my current read , that are both comical and almost unbelievable, about past tours.

The first bike race was held in Paris in 1869 and won by an Englishman, James Moore.
It didn’t take long for sportsmanship to be superseded by gamesmanship.
Bidons made of glass were deliberately tossed over shoulders to puncture the tyres of following riders. Fans were on hand with handfuls of tacks if that should fail.
Riders stole all the ink from checkpoints so that their pursuers would be penalized for failing to sign on.
The winner of the inaugural 1903 Tour, Maurice Garin, was disqualified after finishing first in the 1904 race when it emerged that he had employed the unimaginative but devastatingly effective measure of forgoing his bicycle in favour of a railway carriage during some of the longer stages. Indeed the next three finishers were also stripped of their honours, two of them for being towed uphill by cars trailing corks which they popped between their teeth. Itching powder in rivals’ shorts, spiked drinks, altered road signs - all a bit like ‘Wacky Races’ cartoon!
Another popular trick was to saw through important parts of a rival’s machine while he slept. The early riders always took their bikes up to their hotel rooms to combat theft rather than sabotage.

In early Tours it was by no means uncommon to watch riders stopping to down a huge bottle of wine. In a 1973 Tour of Italy domestiques were seen carrying bottles of lager up to front runners. Bernard Hinault used to get his bidon filled with champagne before the last climb of the day, and when he quit the Renault Team it was over an argument with his team boss about how much wine he was allowed at dinner. At the fateful foot of Ventoux, Tom Simpson joined a crowd of other riders on a bar-raid. He necked a cognac, which can’t have done wonders for an amphetamine-jittered constitution – one of the French riders sank two glasses of red wine.

The second Tour in 1904 was almost the last; as well as the endemic dishonesty of the competitors, crowd trouble got utterly out of hand. Mobs hid in lonely forests, assisting their own local favourites by leaping out to batter rival racers with clubs. Unruly spectators had to be dispersed by firing revolvers in the air, and that was when they were in a good mood!
After a rider from Nimes was disqualified for slipstreaming a car as the race approached his home town, 2,000 of his supporters fought a pitched battle with police and Tour officials.
Later stages had to be rerouted after farmers expressed more obscure grievances by the time-honoured French tradition of blocking the road with machinery and produce.

A slightly mad old man punched Eddy Merckx in the stomach as he rode up the Puy-de-Dome in 1975, and every year some ass with a compact zoom knocks a rider off his bike in the quest for a close-up.

What will we witness in this 2012 Tour de France? All I know is that I will be glued to the TV day in and day out!

[Deleted]

That is a great post, tod. I think the Tour de France was probably a lot more fun before professional sports and big money took over.

When doping starting getting involved to enhance performances, things started to get ugly. The most outrageous example was the infamous "pot belge" which killed a number of cyclists. It was a mixture of amphetamines, painkillers, heroin and cocaine.

Most Europeans never accepted Lance Armstrong's inhuman feats, and it looks like they may have been right. More and more winners have been stripped of their titles in recent years and all of the doping methods are becoming incredibly sneaky -- transfusions of one's own blood collected earlier but injected with extra oxygen and then retransfused just before the beginning of the stage.

The Tour itself is partly guilty for having made the circuit so challenging, but the sponsors and the public are also to blame for wanting so much incredible spectacle at any cost.

I remember when the Tour was not followed by motorcycles and helicopters the entire length and part of the suspense was when a rider did not arrive at the end. I know a couple years where a rider disappeared and his body was found in a ravine 2 or 3 days later. Now they just die in their hotel rooms from drug overdoses.

So I have become quite cynical about the Tour, but my god, what a show every year! So I will be rooting for my favourites as usual and looking at the incredible television scenery.

And I have decided to go and see part of a stage this year, on July 4th.

I would like to see the starting point for once, so I am planning on driving to Abbeville, but I would also like to see them riding along the coast, so I need to plot a strategy that can get me to one of the other cities along the way before they get there (with the main road being closed, of course). I have not yet begun to study my Michelin maps.

[htmb]

Two years ago I got into a fight with an elderly French woman at the Tour de France. My friend and I had visited the Museé Marmotttan on Sunday morning and, on a whim, decided to get off the metro at FDR to try to catch a glimpse ofmthe riders.

It was about 14:30 and the Champs-Élysées was already crowded, but we managed to get a spot near the back side of the Rond Point. We were a good ways back from the street but we had a clear view over the flowers. We waited at least two hours before seeing any type of action.

My friend was to my left and a nice couple, he a Brit and she French, were to my right. We were wedged shoulder to shoulder and spent the time talking to each other. I called my son in Florida on my cell (an expensive call for cheapie me) for a report on how long it would be before the riders came in, as I knew he was watching on television back in Florida. The young French woman even went to check with a policeman to see how long it would be before we would see the riders and he joked that, since they were no longer doping, the riders had gotten slower.

Anyway, after waiting over two hours we started to see some activity. Then all the advance vehicles began flying past and here came the cyclists! Such an exciting moment! However, at the same time this little old, very aggressive French lady decided she was going to try to push me out of the way so she could see. I had been waiting there in the hot sun for almost two and a half hours and this was the first I had seemed of her! I stood my ground, held onto my bag, and refused to move, while keeping my eyes on the riders the whole time. She was really angry, but neither I nor the young French woman on my right would move. After screaming and pushing for a couple of minutes the lady finally departed, leaving me with a huge, black bruise on the back of my arm where she pinched me. The struggle with this not too gentile lady still didnt dampen our excitement. I have attended many major sporting events over the years, but this ranks up there as one of the most exciting for me personally.

Enjoy watching Le Tour, Kerouac. I look forward to reading your reports.

[Deleted]

She must have had a shot of pot belge.

[tod2]

Kerouac, I am so excited for you! You will remember my Trip Report from 2010 where we went to see the beginning of the last stage to Paris in Longjumeau. We never saw the riders but really enjoyed the 'caravan' lobbing out freebies to the crowd. Then jumping back on the train in time to position ourselves in Rue de Rivoli.
I am already looking forward to seeing what you saw in a string of photos!

[Deleted]

Oh, do you think I should take my camera?

[tod2]

Already the pile-ups have begun! I am so happy for Fabian Cancellara being in the Yellow Jersey. I think I heard it was his last tour?
I never knew there were going to be South Africans in this years race - Robbie Hunter has been before but I know nothing of Daryl Impey - who is not riding with Hunter's team.

I hope you have a brilliant time Kerouac.!!!

[Deleted]

There hasn't been a single day yet without massive accidents. Watching right now, another 50 riders went down. All of the bike carrying vehicles look like total overkill when you watch the Tour de France go by -- there seem to be more bikes and wheels on those trucks than there are rolling on the road. But they just had to change so many bikes right now that clearly they need a huge stock of them.

[Deleted]

Ah, they're finally climbing some hills today, through the Vosges and into the Jura. And there are been no collisions so far, from what I've seen.

[tod2]

I couldn't be more "chuffed" (As Froome put it) that this shy young man won the stage today! Not only because he and I are both from Kenya, but because today I saw for the very first time, a real gentleman climb onto the podium
If you stay and watch the presentations every day, you would have noticed that most young riders (not battle scarred chaps like Cancellara) make their way over to the dignataries and very halfheartedly shake hands. Some don't even move to the end of the line but lean across to shake the last persons hand.
But today was different - Froome walked up to each person and with a firm grasp shook hands properly!

I would also like to mention that Taaramae also presented himself with dignity and shook hands properly. Good for you guys - some manners at last!

[Deleted]

Well, today they're resting -- except for those involved in the new doping scandal.

[Deleted]

My turn to be thrilled that Thomas Voeckler won today's stage, even though I was not even able to watch it on television today.

[Deleted]

Tacks on the road was really tacky. (Where does that adjective come from?)

[tod2]

Bradley Wiggins put it in a nutshell......hooligans like that should go off to a soccer game. Sad that "the beautiful game" has been tarnished by trash that take a game too seriously.
You're so right Kerouac - it's a tacky business

I'm not sure about the adjective but we also refer to stickiness being "a tacky feeling", and something poorly presented as 'tacky'.
Those are the two that immediately come to mind.

[Deleted]

Damn, now Frank Schleck has been disqualified for doping. Will they never learn?

[Deleted]

Thomas Voeckler said that he went for the polka dot jersey because that was his children's favourite one.

[Deleted]

Congratulations to Wiggins, the first Englishman to win the Tour de France! And on top of that, he appears to be a nice guy after a wild youth. (He was telling the French media what a drunkard he was at age 21 on a French cycle team all alone in Nantes. But marriage and fatherhood have transformed him.)

Next year's Tour starts in Corsica for the first time ever.

[mossie]

There is a village in Essex called Great Bradley, some wag has added a large piece of paper, with Wiggins on it, to the village sign.