Perfection...

...or something pretty close to it.

I did a couple of interviews yesterday about the imminence of the Tour de France. In both I was asked what it was that I would miss most about my old job at ITV, after its enforced removal.

It’s a tough question. The race has wormed its way into my sense of self to such a great extent, that to try and isolate my feelings towards it is a fairly hopeless pursuit: like asking someone ‘what is it you like about air?’

Away from the race itself, there is an endless list of activities, sensations, discoveries, unexpected moments and sudden changes in the expected pattern of things which define those three weeks on the road. Whether it’s the joy of Pete Kennaugh’s curious passions and scattergun brain firing on all cylinders, David Millar’s witheringly accurate humour, Chris Boardman’s boardmanity, Matt Rendell’s righteous, absurd furies or Gary Imlach’s bone-dry genius, the ITV team had a dysfunctional chemistry to it that developed over time into a kind of alchemy, more than the sum of its parts. I will miss that.

And France, of course. France with its indifference to the outside world, its inherited sense of being settled, its simmering, watchful pride. France with its plane trees, its suited businessmen warming sourdough baguettes under their armpits as they hurry from one place to another, its early morning pastis drinkers and local paper readers in bleus du travail, its shaded squares and softly chiming bell towers. France with its stone arched bridges, and weed stroked rivers, its fields of ripened wheat and lonely water tower. France, whose rugged northern coasts drop sheer into the Atlantic and lit by the setting sun. France with its industrial estates, its péages and its mighty Gothic cathedrals. This is why I am returning in a couple of weeks with the podcast. There is no July for me without this flickering backdrop, this land.

But as for the race? When you remove the headline moments, the sudden shafts of light, the thunderbolts; take out the lone rider caught just metres from the line, the crack and whip of a crash, the thrill of a sudden attack or the loneliness of a rider on the edge of collapse…remove all the billion moments that make the race complete and unfathomable.

Scroll back through the procession of stages, reverse the flow of events and land at the beginning, before the race has started. The Départ. This is what I settled on, in answer to the question.

There is a moment that is certain to be repeated every single year, without fail. At a certain point, ten minutes before the start of the first neutralised roll-out on stage one, the TV helicopter will be hovering above the peloton as it lines up in the main, cobbled square of whichever city has invested in bringing the Tour de France to its heart. This will be our first glimpse of the actors who will write the as yet unwritten story, whose prose and poetry, dialogue and scripture, will fill the hours of July, a Midsummer Month’s Dream.

Look at them down there.

There’s last year’s winner, moving up on the left to take his place at the front, riders leaning to the right to let him pass. Heads are inclined in conversation, former teammates, racing together last year, now divided by colour, new jerseys, new sponsors, debutants, retiring legends racing the Tour for the final time, all corralled into a phalanx of no more than 100 metres.

Here and there riders are lost in thought, standing astride their bike, looking past their handlebars at the French tarmac that will flash before their eyes just before sleep in an endless sequence of hotel rooms marked on their mind’s map. A block of human hope.

It is so nearly a perfect peloton, isn’t it? Yes, there may already be a microbe, a bacterium at secret work in the gut of one or two, a hidden illness that will force a rider off the race in the days to come. And perhaps there are a few furrowed brows from riders anxious about a bruised wrist, or swollen knee and how it might feel when the race begins to move. But for now this is speculative worry, a distant concern. Now, as the noise of the tannoy washes over the bunch, as a rider bends to pull up a sock into its regulated height, or dismounts and spins a wheel to feel it running through the warming air. Now there is only the present.

No points have been scored it the King of the Mountains, nor the maillot vert, no stages won or lost, no sequence of near-things suffered, nor daily battles to remain in the race endured. No rider has crashed yet, no raindrop has fallen, and the worst that little gust of wind they felt just now could do was pick at the edge of a pinned dossard number, and send a tiny shiver along the spine.

No one has lost time or gained it. Everything is set to zero. What happens next, and over 21 stages, is that everything falls apart. This peak of potential simply collapses like a tower of playing cards. The Tour de France is a lesson in atrophy that speaks to our unconscious. But all that future must wait, for now we watch them clip in, as the countdown begins…

Despite the wrinkles and hairline faults that bedevil all human endeavour, this attendant moment, this collective in-breath minutes before the Tour de France begins are as close to perfection as anything I have ever known.

This is the moment that I will miss with all my heart.

*****

This is the answer I gave in yesterday’s interview, and as I spoke, my voice caught from time to time. And then, glory be, I realised that I will not have to be watch on from afar as this moment of wonder passes, and that I will not have to stand at the gates of the event, locked out and looking in!

Stage one of this year’s race is a team time trial, I realised. There is no neutralised roll out. Put bluntly, there will only be Cofidis on the start ramp, with an anxious looking Bryan Coquard in an aero helmet, off in pursuit of that elusive victory at the Tour de France that will doubtless elude the old warrior again. That Coquardian bathos, I can cope with. That is something I can absorb with a cursory glance at the telly, as I watch on from whatever roadside café David, Lizzie and I have chosen to have our breakfast in that day.

It’s OK, after all.