Why the Tour de France is a unique and all-encompassing event

After all, writes Lawrence Ostlere, where else can you get inches from the athletes’ grimacing faces?

Tadej Pogacar claims the ninth stage of the Tour de France on 6 September (AFP/Getty)

As a sports writer, the best way to make the words flow is to immerse yourself in the action. When you spend several days living and breathing a sport or a team or an event, it can almost feel like the keys on your laptop press themselves; the sentences are already formed in your mind and the article is absorbed by the screen in front of you like ink on a page.

At the Tour de France there’s more opportunity than most events to get close to the action. After all, where else can you get inches from the athletes’ grimacing faces, standing in the midst of their arena as they ride?  

In many ways the Tour is a unique experience. You drive to the start, where fans and officials and riders all buzz around. There you speak to other journalists or a team director, or simply observe something worth writing later. Then you head to the media centre at the finish to hole up and watch the race, perhaps via a stop along the way to watch the peloton go by.  

From the media centre you can usually walk to the finish line itself and watch the climax before heading back for the post-stage press conference and to wrap up your final piece. Then you begin your preview for the next day, and by the time you’re off the mountain and at the next hotel it’s usually pretty late.  

The Tour is all-consuming, and that’s part of what makes it so brilliant to cover.  

This, then, is the challenge when trying to convey a race like the Tour from the comfort of your living room or home office. There is plenty of quality coverage on TV and online but it’s not quite the same.  

The biggest thing I’ve learnt is that the Tour de France is an easy race to follow, but a hard race to truly consume.

Yours,

Lawrence Ostlere

Assistant sports editor