Cycling and guts vs. glory

Now that the World Cup is over, I can finally turn my attention to that other international sporting event of the summer: the Tour de France.

Even without the drama of Lance Armstrong’s record-breaking back-to-back wins, the Tour is endlessly compelling to watch. I’m hard-pressed to think of a sport that demands more from its participants; the sprints, the climbs, and the crashes over three punishing weeks take an immense toll on the riders — but pushing through all that is what makes the sport (and the athletes) great.

Over at the Spectator, Alex Massie defends this “cycle-sadism”:

[F]or fans, cycling is a quest for the epic. The road is the venue for heroism and tilting at impossible targets. For riders, it’s a matter of survival. Worse still, glory is dependent upon suffering and the greater the sacrifice the greater the glory.

When Octave Lapize became the first man to cross the Tourmalet (in 1910 – hence honouring the mountain this year) he cursed the “assassins” responsible for putting the riders through such purgatory. He might have cursed the fans too, since we’re complict in the cyclists’ suffering too. Worse than complicit, really, since we demand it. There’s a disturbing element of sadism involved.

If it’s too easy, however, then it’s not remarkable enough and the point of the Grand Tours is that they’re supposed to be ridiculous and, consequently, extraordinary. We might not go quite so far as Henri Desgrange’s observation that a “perfect Tour” would end with only one man finishing the course but many of us might agree that bad weather and challenging courses make the racing harder and more interesting. I’ve not met many cycling fans who ever complained that a race was too mountainous.

And the trade-off for all the pain? As Massie says, the upside is that “honour is generously spread around. Winning is not the only thing. Indeed it’s often not the most important thing at all”:

On any given day it’s not the stage winner or the race leader who necessarily receives the palm. It could be the man who has lost the leader’s jersey but battled heroically to retain it, or it could be the selflessness of a subordinate who wins our admiration or a rider revealing hitherto unsuspected depths of character and courage or someone simply riding with glorious panache who becomes the day’s “real” winner. That is, the actual race standings tell only part of the story and not always even the most interesting part.

The Tour offers up stories like this every day, and they tend to be the ones that inspire and stick with you. There were some incredible plays during the World Cup, to be sure, but nothing that I think captures the imagination in quite the same way.

This year’s Tour has already been more chaotic than usual; Lance Armstrong says it was the most stressful start of a race he’s ever encountered. There’s plenty of debate over whether it’s been too much on the riders — but whatever else, it certainly won’t be boring.