Bientot, Le Tour

It’s hard to ignore it any more, so we’re not going to.

I’m sure you know already that the Tour de France is coming up on us fast. Following a frankly disappointing football world cup it’s nice to be able to focus on a sport where as a nation we are reasonably good. Where we go into every football competition with fairly unfounded high hopes, cycling does offer some real hope. We have world champions across loads of disciplines and the Tour de France will have a record six British riders starting form Rotterdam on Saturday. There will also be a British-sponsored team in the shape of Team Sky so it’s looking good for some home-nation’s success. As we watch men who are far fitter than we’ll ever be even if we were to engage in dodgy drug and blood doping practices, and riding bikes that only people with the sort of job where they can never find time to ride can afford, with or without tiny hidden engines, you can feel both grateful that you don’t have to kill yourself over 200Km a day, and jealous that your commute isn’t your entire job.

Follow the Tour de France on telly on ITV4 or on the internet at www.letour.fr.

We won’t be covering the Tour in any detail. We’ll leave that to the people who are actually there, although if we see anything interesting happening on the telly we’ll be sure to mention it. That’s the sort of in depth coverage you can expect here. Half arsed comment when we spot something that we find amusing is absolutely the way we think major sporting events should be reported.

While we’re discussing athletes who have their equipment entirely paid for I was interested to see the exact opposite in an article on a sector of the Ghana police who are threatening to fight the government over money that they had to pay to keep the bikes that they used for their job in running order. The officers involved are keeping the bikes until the money they feel they are owed is paid back to them. Quite a contrast to the Tour riders who are supported with entire spare bikes available on every stage and custom fittings to mach any jerseys they win.

A