Sport doesn’t heal. But it distracts and delights in the most amazing and necessary ways. As the Tour de France carries on and continues to roll through the shattered French landscape, the revitalizing strength of this powerful placebo effect should not be underestimated.
In a time of grave and irremediable sickness, we all need to look the other way for an extended moment just to gather our thoughts, search for our hopes and suppress the reawakened feelings of despair. The morning after scores of innocent and joy-filled people were callously killed on a Nice promenade, millions of conflicted cycling fans woke up to watch a race that was expressly created to bring a vast country and its widely separated peoples closer together.
We live in a world where our leaders, faced with yet another attack, automatically proclaim that life goes on, that life has to go on or else the terrorist punks win. And yet it can seem frivolous to be a fan addicted to the annual three-week jaunt that takes a global village of the world’s best road cyclists, pedal stroke by pedal stroke, across France’s most testing terrain.
When Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme announced that the race would proceed with its Stage 13 individual time trial – or contre-la-montre as devotees refer to it in jovial singsong French – he stated: “Today, we want to pay homage to the victims with dignity.”
That is an admirable sentiment, and even the shallowest Tour fanatic should recognize through his drunken mountaintop haze that the ruder, dumber expressions of mass sport need to be suspended.
But the Tour de France, for all its extraordinary, century-long history and still-potent respect for past heroes, is not meant to be a remote and reverential experience. The riders may be the most disciplined and stoical performers in the entire sports world, but they do their work as an inseparable part of the French landscape, intermingled with an entire nation.
The openness of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, so inviting to a predatory opportunist, exactly mirrors the wildly open availability in which the Tour takes pride. There are no barriers to speak of: The jam-packed city streets are the public arenas, the patio tables on the poplar-lined village squares are the less-than-exclusive private boxes, the chaotic, fan-choked mountain climbs become the improvised front-row seats where the top riders strain helplessly to move forward through the cheering crowds that block their path. This is what freedom would look like, if you weren’t so preoccupied with a bike race.
As a daily viewer far away in well-behaved Canada, where the boundaries between high-salaried superstar and paying spectator are more strictly enforced, I watched the chaos of the Tour’s Bastille Day stage on legendary Mont Ventoux with a mixture of fascination and horror (or so I would have called it in the hours before Nice). One rider, Richie Porte, smashed into a Tour motorbike that was forced to an abrupt stop by the congealing crowds. The crash destroyed the bike of Chris Froome, the Tour leader, who took off up the mountain on foot, the only way he knew to bring order to the chaos and rescue his shattered hopes.
The Tour definitely isn’t about dignity at moments like this. There’s a loss of control and respect that makes you worry about the unthinking side of humanity. But the thinking, plotting side of the human race can be even worse, as we now recognize.
And as I keep watching the unstoppable Tour, what I see is a competition capable of modelling a human unity that we are in a constant danger of losing. There are no borders, no barriers in this sport. The man-made differences of division we fabricate are put aside for a few weeks of effortful fun, and the high-security vigilance that closes off so much of modern life can’t establish a foothold in this boisterous and benevolent parallel world of sweaty, competitive peace.
Dour, joyless, lone-wolf plotters must look at all this disordered happiness and wonder why their resentments are so out of step with the collective exuberance of sport. But of course the world the Tour de France successfully inhabits is far more complicated than the us-and-them simplicities a terrorist needs to impose.
Over the long history of the landscape that the Tour traverses, religious wars have slaughtered tens of thousands of innocents in hideous ways far too brutal to contemplate today. Bastille Day, the celebration disrupted so heartlessly in Nice, is rooted in a revolution that marked a triumph of enlightened principles with a huge amount of gruesome death thrown in. Even the Tour itself began as a commercial expression of partisanship during the Dreyfus Affair, a scandal that divided all of France on political, religious and class lines.
So this happy innocence, this necessary escapism, comes with baggage. That is the human way, and all that splendid geography shouldn’t be allowed to escape its history. But we remain able to learn, to cherish the fundamental goodness and greatness of humanity that something as strange and wonderful as a three-week bike race can provide.
Friday’s time trial, it’s worth noting, ended near Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, a cave that contains the oldest paleolithic paintings in the world. More than 30,000 years before the Tour passed by on its nationwide progress, people unimaginably like us crowded into the hidden darkness and made great art – as a distraction, a delight, but, most important, as a way to feel alive.
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