11
With love
Watching the Tour de France live from the US is an odd prospect. The timings of the stages make the early morning wakeup call unavoidable. But unlike with other sports, the English Premier League for example, there aren’t people queuing up at pubs at 5:30 AM to watch the départ réel, at least in Chicago, where I live. In truth, even if there were, I’m not sure if I would partake.
I’ve come to relish the immediate relocation from bed to couch, early enough that I don’t have to turn the AC on yet and can enjoy a bit of breeze through the open window. I like being able to choose whether to have a communal watching experience –– texting friends in Europe, messaging my fantasy league’s group chat, or joining other Anglophone fans on the forums –– or a solitary one, just me, the commentators, and the peloton.
I am lucky that the nature of my work allows me to set aside this time every summer to watch the full Tour de France. Most Tour watchers do what I did for many years – keep up with the race via highlights, or recaps, or by tuning into the last hour of the important mountain stages. The time commitment of watching the full race is enormous. But the enormity is part of the pull.
Even compared to other grand tours –– and I have watched all of every stage of both the Vuelta and the Giro –– the Tour is a singular experience. The stakes are higher, the hype is bigger, the emotion is more clarified. There’s an aura around the Tour that I have never felt nor seen replicated in cycling or in any other sporting event - not the World Cup, not the Olympics, not the Finals.
But if I didn’t watch every second, I would miss some of the most delightful moments of watching the Tour, which occur in the boring, flat kilometers where no race action is happening. In those stretches, I get to see teammates spraying each other with water bottles to keep cool. I get to watch a large bag of Haribo gummy bears get passed around, regardless of team or national affiliations. I get to enjoy the jokes coming through the team radios and spot two of my favorite riders chatting in the bunch, before brutally attacking each other. There’s an incredible sense of joy that permeates the Tour, and for me, it comes out the most in these kilometers.
The action that happens in the high mountains will be enthralling no matter what, and if you choose to only watch those stages, or only watch the last hour or so of those stages, you will be treated to an epic rivalry, gorgeous scenery, and goosebump-inducing attacks. But if you have the time, if you can fight your own body to wake up for the départ, the payoff will be so much sweeter for having watched the hours, days, and weeks of buildup beforehand.
The Tour is an endurance event for spectators as well as riders. Three weeks will feel at once incredibly long and far too short. You’ll catch your breath on the rest days even as the tension continues to mount. There will be an emotional hangover at the end of it all, and you will need some time to process everything you saw and felt. That’s part of the beauty, too – each edition of the Tour is its own emotional experience, with its own energy and its own particular romance. Every summer, you can get swept up in it anew.
Our hope with this guide is that you now have the lay of the land and are feeling less intimidated to dive into this most beautiful of sporting events. My personal hope is that you maybe feel the gentle tug towards doing something a little crazy and diving in headfirst, watching the whole thing this year.
Cycling will not solve your problems. But watching the Tour in full for the first time is a transformative experience. You will not be the same person after the peloton finishes their laps of Montmartre as you are now.
We’ll see you on the other side.
We’ll see you on the other side.