“The Tour has an ambiguous morality”, wrote Roland Barthes in his Mythologies (1957): “chivalrous imperatives are constantly mixed with brutal reminders of the pure spirit of success”. In this confrontation resided, according to him, the “essential meaning of the Tour”, ” [permettant] to the legend of covering with a veil that is both honorable and exciting the economic determinisms of [cette] great epic”.
Rollie, as I affectionately called him when I was studying at UQAM, practically takes the words out of my mouth. Even though I follow the Tour de France from afar, most often typing the summary of the day’s stage on my phone, I admit to being bored by the fine gestures of the champions of the past, their unwritten laws and their old-fashioned conception of honor which, married to the green or dantesque landscapes of old France, gave the Grande Boucle its particular cachet, making this amoeboid human mass launched on the country roads something a little mysterious, not completely mechanical.
It was Indurain who, in the last meters of a mountain finish, offered victory on a plateau to the breakaway of a rival team who had become his vassal during the ascent, because Miguel, thrifty like the peasant from Navarre he is, throne in the general classification and can afford to play the lords with stage victories. It was Jan Ullrich who, on the climb to Luz-Ardiden, when Lance Armstrong had fallen behind him, instead of attacking, quietly raised his foot to wait for him with the rest of the peloton; and when reporters ask him why he let his one chance to win the 2003 Tour slip away, he basically replies, “I don’t even understand why you’re asking that question…”
Gestures that are part of a “very old, feudal or tragic ethic” (Barthes), there are probably still some in the peloton. But enough to remain in the memories and define the substance of a stage? In 2022, the essence of the Tour de France is undoubtedly to be found elsewhere than in this perfume of chivalry. Those who ride in the lead seem to obey more what the author of the Mythologies called “the new requirements specific to the world of total competition”.
As I write these lines, the most demanding and prestigious bicycle race in our little corner of the universe is probably being played out in the Alps. If, as expected, the double title holder, Tadej Pogacar, took off his closest pursuers and crushed any hint of competition somewhere between the mythical Galibier and the no less mythical Alpe d’Huez, the Tour 2022 will be “folded”, as they say there. Between flock of clouds and Promethean rockery, we will have seen a new boss emerge, in the tradition of Merckx, Hinault… and Armstrong.
Yes, Lance Armstrong. Because if the Slovenian’s bulimia for victories, the antithesis of the Zen calculations of an Indurain, has above all earned him comparisons as flattering as they are ambivalent with the “cannibal” Eddy Merckx, it is for the Texan, seven times fallen winner (and erased of official history as surely as an old Leninist under Stalin), which makes me think irresistibly of the chorus of incredulous praise welcoming the rise of a new superman. Pogacar, 23 years old and big teeth. He doesn’t even seem to suffer, whereas suffering is the religion of the Tour; someone compared it to a moped.
When Armstrong won his first Tours de France at the turn of the millennium, we had never seen someone grind so fast, develop so much power in the passes. For any observer with a minimum of critical sense, the prodigious all-terrain ease of Tadej Pogacar, from the old cobblestones of Europe to the highways of the time trial, is just as breathtaking.
Did you really think I was going to manage to talk about the Tour de France without writing the d-word?
“The Tour, wrote Pierre Foglia in 2003, is no longer this mythical space where dramas were tied, where breakaways developed like fantastic rides in Dantesque settings, where stories were born that made the race a literary event as much than sporty. Today, tragedies almost always take place on the fringes of the race itself, such as doping cases and their legalization…”
After the devastating Festina affair in 1998, we promised a big clean-up. Afterwards, there were the Armstrong years, seven years of happiness… A study unveiled on June 30 by the Statista group reveals that, since 1998, half of the riders who have finished on the Tour de France podium have been involved in doping cases. The Grand Ménage is now the central myth of the Tour.
I was almost on holiday – I had the next 100 words to write before I could enjoy the benefits of a six-week break – when the news hit my phone: Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard had attacked in the last five kilometers from the terrifying Granon Pass and it had taken more than two minutes for the Slovenian marvel, victim of a “failure”. The scribes of The Team could no longer be, we were already talking about a mythical stage.
A page of the legend had just been written. And me, I finally loved this crucified Pogacar in full ascent of a wall 2400 meters high and 9% average gradient. Doped or not doped, he is human, after all.