Vacation Notes: Haute-Tech in the Hautes-Montagnes

Jim English

University of Pennsylvania

 

Even to a fan like me, the Tour de France seems a pretty weird sporting event. By the standards of contemporary spectator sport, there is something almost laughable in a three-week-long bicycle race that is so elaborately staged and involves so much apparatus and so many people, yet offers so few moments of real excitement. Race organizers are aware of this, and have lately been attempting to bring the event better into line with the contemporary sporting scene. But to judge by this year’s Tour, which two friends and I followed during its final week through the Pyrenees, these attempts to improve or normalize the race are only making it stranger. While we certainly enjoyed the race as a race, we found ourselves enjoying it even more as a sort of comedy of cultural contradictions. The recent efforts to “modernize” what remains basically an old-world, pain-oriented, macho sport (its traditional off-season counterpart is boxing) have created some bizarre incongruities. The commercial packaging and the “look” of the Tour have been dramatically altered by the introduction of new technologies, but the mythology of the sport, along with the activity itself–the actual physical demands made on competitors–have scarcely changed since the turn of the century. More and more one is confronted with disconcerting asymmetries between the “modernized” Tour de France and a cycling culture whose material and mythological elements resist modernization.

 

One such material element is the bike rider’s derriere. For the second year in a row, an apparently secure victory was imperilled in the closing days by a saddle boil, reminding everyone that despite impressive recent developments in clothing and hygiene technologies, there has been little success in containing eruptions of the lower bodily stratum: a rider’s sore bottom can still become the focal point and the decisive factor of the whole colossal production. It’s easy to be misled in this regard by today’s aerodynamic, miracle-fiber uniforms, which have a cleaner, zippier look than the old suits and, with their shiny surfaces, make far more effective billboards for team sponsors. But the fact is that inside this state-of-the-art gear there is not only perspiration, blood, and puss but also sometimes urine and even diarrhea. Seven consecutive hours of racing will induce unhappy effects in even the best dressed of competitors.

 

Like the uniforms, the bikes too keep getting sleeker, more reliable, more specialized and rational in design. But this only accentuates the extreme unreliability of the riders, who this year seemed more than ever uncertain of their abilities and confused about their roles. Consider Claudio Chiappucci, a second-rank rider for the struggling Carrera Jeans team. Judged a non-contender, Chiappucci was permitted a substantial lead on the opening stage, and then spent the entire race losing time to rivals while hurling insults at them for lacking his “panache.” Yet this apparent mediocrity held on for an impressive second place and very nearly became the first rider in modern times to “steal” a Tour de France. Pre-race favorite Raul Alcala, a brilliant natural climber, was all bulked up this year to improve his strength on the flats. His weight training seemed to be paying off, and for the first week everyone was in awe of the new, more muscular Alcala. But as soon as the race hit the mountains, this aura of invincibility dissolved and, as one rider remarked at Mont Blanc, Alcala suddenly just seemed “big and slow like a dirigible.” The other rider who came to the race with a new and more robust physique was defending champion Greg LeMond. But in this case no one was intimidated by the extra poundage. With his cutting-edge aerodynamic equipment and flawless position on the bike, the blimp-like LeMond had been a comical sight all season, putting in performances that can only be described as embarrassing. “I worry more about my grandmother,” 1987 Tour winner Stephen Roche said at one point this spring. Yet LeMond proved against all evidence to be the fittest rider in the race, and produced a beautifully economical victory. As so often happens, the French cycling press was reduced in the end to explaining the race in terms of “miracles.” While technological developments have succeeded in virtually eliminating the wild card of mechanical failure, oddsmakers are still losing their shirts on the Tour and sportswriters are still narrativizing it as spiritual quest.

 

Of course this is, for many, the whole appeal of the event, that it forces riders past known limits, past the point of predictability. The cumulative strain of stage racing actually makes the riders ill; by the final week you can hear collective coughing and wheezing at the crest of quite modest inclines. Under these conditions a rider’s form is so fragile that even a proven champion can, as they say, “crack” or “explode” at a crucial moment. Indeed, such moments are for aficionados the race’s main attraction. “Suffering” is the established god term of the French cycling vernacular. For diehard Tour fans, the only spectacle that matters is that of the body in pain. (The male body, that is. Though a women’s race has been part of the Tour for a decade, few fans have accepted the idea of a woman stage racer. This year organizers finally gave up and, despite the near certainty of another French victory by the great Jeannie Longo, abolished the Tour Feminin.)

 

To take part in these pain-fests, fans are willing to suffer a bit themselves. To catch the finish of the decisive 16th stage at Luz-Ardiden in the Pyrenees we had to negotiate an enormous traffic jam at the base of the climb, hike fifteen kilometers uphill in near- record heat, wait three hours for the race, and then hike back down again through the exhaust fumes and honking horns of a traffic jam that now extended from the top of the mountain to the center of Lourdes, 35km away. All this to see a few small clusters of contenders shoot past, followed by perhaps a half hour’s worth of intermittent stragglers. It is difficult to explain to non-Tour fanatics why five hundred thousand people would put up with so much for so little, some of them actually camping out at the summit days in advance, staking their ground at Luz- Ardiden while the race was still in Marseilles. For Tour fans, the point is simply to be there, not just for social reasons (as is the case in small villages en route) but in order to share in some measure the lived space of the riders during their moments of suffering. Even to know the final outcome of the stage is not as important as experiencing simultaneously with the riders themselves the terrain, the weather, the exact force of the obstacles that must be overcome. A particularly difficult stretch of road two or three kilometers from the summit, or an haute-categorie climb at some much earlier point in the race–any spot where a key contender is likely to “crack”–will attract nearly as many fans as the finish area itself.

 

But this determination simply to be there at all costs is not really what Tour organizers desire in a spectator, and the fans who made the trek up to Luz- Ardiden–variously French, Bearnaise-French, Basque, and Spanish, but overwhelmingly low-income farmers and laborers–do not represent an ideal mix from the standpoint of prospective sponsors. The predominance of “peasants” is one bottom-line disadvantage to the sport’s old-world ethic of suffering. Another is that high levels of sickness and pain in the Tour can only be secured by long (sometimes week-long) stretches of utterly routine, and in themselves uninteresting, softening-up stages. And while it’s true that a body at the breaking point has a certain marketability, in the grand calculus of advertising a 22-day sporting event configured around two or three moments of extreme anguish (for which, moreover, there can be no charge of admission) leaves plenty of room for commercial adjustments.

 

Hence the recent efforts to “modernize” the Tour, of which the increasing emphasis on equipment innovation and technological advantage is just one sign. Another and more telling sign was the giant “television” (actually a collapsible scoreboard-type screen mounted in a mock-TV cabinet) that was perched at the very summit of the Luz-Ardiden climb. The mountain is so barren, and rises so steeply to such a sharp peak, that this mammoth symbol of the “new” Tour de France was clearly visible four and five kilometers down the road. As the riders made their way over the fearsome col de Tourmalet, the last hurdle before the Luz, all eyes, binoculars, and telescopic camera lenses were trained on this impressive publicity gimmick from Antenne 2, the official channel of the Tour. It was quite a sight: half a million people clustered densely together atop a magnificent mountain in the Pyrenees, all watching TV. From our naked-eye perspective at the 2km mark, the screen itself looked blank: the scene resembled nothing so much as pilgrims come to make sacrifice before some great and impassive idol, their TV-God. But the real moment of truth arrived when the first of the riders came charging past. With the actual race now taking place before their eyes, many people continued to watch the simulation. And who can blame them? If we had been closer, or had brought binoculars, we would have done the same. A bike race on a TV screen is far more “watchable” by the measure of contemporary sports entertainment than is the erratic parade of men in pain that constitutes a bike race on a mountain side.

 

And of course this is what is really at stake in “modernizing” the Tour; altering patterns of consumption, reshaping the practice of spectatorship. The new parameters of the route, to which fans are already growing accustomed–fewer ultra-high-mileage days, fewer marathon climbing stages, more half-stages, more intermediate sprints for bonus points, etc.–are not just increasing the proportion of watchable to unwatchable moments, but re-presenting the whole race as something you watch rather than something you do. Persuading mountaintop spectators to keep their eyes on the box rather than the road is only an incidental step in this process of modernization. The main thing is to persuade a new and more “contemporary” audience, the chic boutique owners in the Marais, for example, or the yuppies who are buying condos out at La Villette (French for Silicon Valley)–all those upscale Parisians whose only contact with the race is the annoying jam of tourists along the Champs Elysees during the ceremonial final stage–that the Tour de France is for them, too. That it’s fun to watch!

 

Whether this marketing strategy can ever really succeed with a “peasant sport” so strikingly ill-suited to the demands of commercial television is not at all certain. When the Tour rolled through the Alps this year there was a stylish young Parisian in the lead, yet organizers were unable to translate this into anything remotely resembling “Tour fever” in Paris. And their inability to sell the Tour Feminin, perhaps the boldest modernizing step of all, is another sign that their effectivity is far from unlimited. Nonetheless, that giant TV screen atop Luz Ardiden did represent genuine change. The Tour de France is already being practiced differently by its fans, and the transformation of cycling culture is likely to continue even if it doesn’t pay off in the end for the sponsors. And although there’s nothing to regret in the Tour’s shedding of its pseudo-spiritual, macho- masochistic character, we can hardly celebrate the emergence of one more frameable, watchable sports- entertainment package. Personally, I take heart from the Tour’s caricatural American twin–perhaps the first truly postmodern bicycle race–the Tour de Trump. Even a thoroughly banalized Tour de France can still exceed the organizers’ intentions and leave space for some saving cultural comedy.