Tour de France - No rest for the wicked

A couple of years ago I decided to open up the commentary in the Tour de France box by taking e-mail questions on air and bouncing them around between Sean and myself. The exercise is incredibly enlightening about the type of people watching the tour and more importantly how many of them have little or no idea about bike racing and only ever watch the Tour de France.

Of course dyed-in-the-wool bikies hate it. They know most of the answers to the most asked questions but we get hundreds of questions asking the same things day after day: What do the riders have in their musettes? How do they go to the toilet during a race? Has anyone ever won the Tour without winning a stage? Interestingly I did get the question last week, has anyone lost the tour by being bitten by a dog, to which I confess I did not know the answer.

One question we consistently get is; what do riders do on the rest days? Well certainly this year at least one team was chowing down with invited guests on stacks of Burritos. The Garmin Chipotle team were doing the Tex-Mex thing for friends and the press at their hotel within an air of easy confidence at the event, with American Christian Vandevelde lying third on the general classification, a tantalising 38 seconds off the yellow jersey and with a real shot at a podium in Paris.

Possibly the busiest people on the rest days are the press corps. Conferences, one-on-one interviews, round-up programmes and finding some time to do the washing mean I am up just as early as a race day and often to bed later. This year the 1st race day in Pau was particularly busy as it included the aforementioned Burritos eating exercise and an evening invitation to join the Irish Tourist Board to promote the 2008 Tour of Ireland. There was of course never a hope in hell of avoiding the Irish bash when Sean Kelly is your commentary partner but even so it meant a return to the hotel in Tarbes well after midnight with a fistful of new business cards.

But by far the biggest problem faced by riders and press alike on rest day is avoiding bike groupies. I’m not talking here about those fans who spend their time following and supporting individual riders or teams but the sort of groupie who makes your blood run cold when you hear their voice in the distance.

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One such man, a lean bearded Australian of apparently no fixed abode can in fact cause panic by the mere rumour of his presence. His booming voice can by heard berating all and sundry about their moral duty to promote his ‘charitable’ interests but as yet no-one has ever seen evidence of any of these. A free meal, a bed, replacement parts for his bike, all these come within the scope of this extraordinary man’s demands and amazingly he often gets them, largely from new targets who are unaware of the horror that lies in store when he wheels up to them and, after just 5 minutes in his company, offer all to get rid of him.

Luckily I caught sight of this nemesis when leaving the Burritos bash and pulling on the largest pair of shades I could find, scuttled off to the car whilst he was busy badgering the mechanics of Team Columbia parked up at the same hotel. Sadly my colleague Patrick Winterton was not so lucky. I hear he is still in shock. I also hear that the next man on his hit list is no less than Sean himself.

It remains to be seen if we can make it back to Paris without such a close encounter of the ‘merde’ kind.