Le Tour

The Tour de France has begun and so has our annual month-long interest in the sport. Now, before you tell me "I'm still not interested in cycling", I meant that July is the one month of the year when any cycling event makes ESPN highlights and gets a paragraph or two in your local paper. The Tour is cycling's biggest event. Nothing comes close, especially for sports fans here in the U.S.A. You still may not care, but a few more than normal actually do.

Not surprisingly, I am one of them. I like the Tour. It provides a number of things I find entertaining about athletics. It's both a team and individual sport. It provides rewards for both speed and endurance. It's oozes with history and tradition. It also provides some of the most picturesque backgrounds in all of sport. Belgian villages complete with cobblestone roads, the Alps and the finale in Paris. Not even a great golf course provides that kind of diverse and sometimes inspiring scenery.

The Tour de France also provides me with a break. It's over in twenty-three days. I need not invest any more time than about a month pondering it. I'm not overwhelmed with pre-season hype. I do not have to sit through hours and hours of television analysis of the last event and hours more debating the next one. No mythical champions. No post-season. No strikes or lockouts. No salary cap considerations.

I watch today's race and, if it fits into my schedule, watch tomorrow's. When the event comes to an end. That's it. I have no desire to follow the sport beyond July and the media's lack of year round obsession with the event makes the Tour refreshing for me.

Sure, the Tour de France has it's share of problems. There are the constant charges about doping. There is the pettiness that surrounds all athletes. There is whining and crying about conditions, the course, the competitors. There is, of course, the influence of commercialism. These cyclists are like NASCAR drivers, covered in corporate logos. Those endorsements deals can influence race strategy. ("Hey, I've got an idea. Get one of your guys to break away from the pack, so our logo gets more time on worldwide tv.")

For those of us watching here in the States, there is also the Outdoor Life Network's Lance-hype machine that not only invades the broadcast, rightly so as the guy is trying for six straight yellow jersey, but in nearly every single commercial. It's basically, Lance TV.

However, for only three weeks, I can easily disregard the problems facing the Tour. Seriously, after the race is complete I won't hear another word about any of issues for over 330 days. I can also learn to ignore OLN's incessant Lance promotions. They've got to make their money where and when they can. Besides, Armstrong is the story, as OLN's Al Trautwig correctly points out.

So, tomorrow it's Stage Three. I'm not sure where it starts or where it ends, as I have yet to watch today. I don't know whether it's a time trial, a long journey through the French countryside or a climb through the mountians. I do know there's a race. Unless, there's a scheduled day off, there will be a race the day after, as well. For cycling, that's all I need to know.