Tour de France - Bop till you Drop

The Tour Caravan

If only we had turned the right way in the underground car park at our hotel. The extraordinarily time consuming feat of negotiating a maze of cars, concrete pillars and eyes of needles may have saved the paintwork of our car but it brought us out into the middle of Toulouse this morning only to be trapped by the passing tour caravan on its way to the depart.

You have to feel for the men and women employed to dress up as giant squirrels, pedal the length and breadth of France on static bike trainers on the back of a float, drive the quad bike clad to look like a round of cheese or gyrate wildly on the back of a truck to the latest club hits. It’s a silly job, but someone’s got to do it.

The Tour de France caravan has been an integral part of the world’s biggest annual sporting event for the best part of the last 50 years. It may be a painful experience to watch over and over again for those of us who have to work on the Tour de France but certainly the crowd of children opposite our vantage point this morning waved to enthusiastically to every single float.

Bike racing, unlike stadium sports, doesn’t offer the benefit of fixed point advertising for sponsors and whilst the trade team sponsors get TV airtime there are many smaller or regional sponsors who rely on the tour caravan to get across their message. 20 kilometres in length, made up of over 200 vehicles and taking 45 minutes to pass, the men and women of this multicoloured, music blaring snake boogie their way from town to town distributing over 11 million free gifts during the course of the event.

Is there a pecking order for bizarre caravan roles one wonders? Surely you must ‘pay your dues’ faithfully banging a drum dressed as a giant green mineral water bottle before climbing the ladder of promotion to bare your face to the public and throw thousands of floppy sunhats to a frenzied, gift grabbling roadside crowd. You know you’ve made when you are appointed by Credit Lyonnais to drive the 25ft high lion float, clearly a job for life.

Bike racing itself is of course a job with a limited life-span but stick your head behind the barriers and you will find many an ex-rider also involved with the sponsors of the Tour itself. Last night amongst a dripping crowds, wet to the skin from the relentless rain that soaked the streets of Toulouse you could have Richard Virenque signing copies of his ‘Velo Maniacs’ children’s cartoon book, or Jacky Durand dressed, bizarrely for him, from head to foot in polka dots greeting the pubic as a representative of Champion supermarkets. Eric Caritoux and Jacques Michaud can be seen each day in a shirt bearing the logo of Orange, Vincent Barteau in the shirt of Vittel, the great Poulidor himself can be seen each day in the bright yellow shirt of Credit Lyonnais.

It’s a shame that for the most part viewers of the Tour don’t get a glimpse of the caravan and all that surrounds it. For the true, full fat, experience the only place to be is the side of the road, happy in the knowledge that, as the sun goes down on your day at ‘la Grand Boucle’ you too can take home pockets full of mini cheeses, keyrings and sticky salamis and a wave from a hero of the past.

Happy days.