Tour de France: A race of pain and beauty, yet cloud of doping still hangs heavy

It is three hours until Australian Ben O’Connor will prevail in the hail at the summit, but navigating the mountain beast by car is a psychological examination in itself. No one respects anything with an engine here. About 25 minions are line-dancing in the middle of the road. My clutch is revising its will. Airhorn! Marge Simpson waves a Tricolore across the bonnet.

Amid a cacophony of clanging cowbells, an Orangina can has just been lobbed through my window and nestled next to my brake pedal. I consider walking the remaining eight kilometres of bleak mountainside. But humanity’s ability to reach breaking point and persevere is what the Tour exists to prove.

Concocted to sell newspapers, the world’s biggest bike race essentially endures as an advertising tool for both France and a litany of sponsors, from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel’s “unofficial ambassador” to a Belgian flooring company and local supermarket.

Of course, France advertises itself effortlessly. Even travelling between stages becomes an event in itself, winding along the Isère or the Arly, flanked by Alps on all sides. Southern French towns are like folk songs; never new and they never get old, trapped on the edge of a decline which will never hit, pastel murals peeling by design. Bollène and its Flutes of the World Museum. Vif, proud home of the world’s first reinforced concrete tower. Albertville, Annecy, Aime.

At the most recent estimate, about 12 million people attend the Tour each year, whether for three weeks or three minutes. The waiting has become a fundamental part of the spectacle, caravans lining the roadside with barbecues, beers and flatscreens, organisers placating the masses with a constant supply of gratuit goodies. Sponsors are happy to provide these, plastering their branding over polka-dot T-shirts, fans, flags for a cheese conglomerate, those floppy cycling caps that should have died out with polio. Every brand hires a fleet of tireless hype people with rictus grins to lob this promotional tat from cars and floats, driveable bucket hats and leeks and a giant polystyrene jar of pesto that somehow really smells like pesto.

Anyone passing by, piercing the anticipation, is enough to elicit screams of fanatical delight: the gendarmes, hikers, a mosquito eradication campaign, me.

For the biggest event in cycling, there is a charmingly low-budget undercurrent. Stage 19 is rerouted because an outbreak of bovine nodular dermatitis means cows have to be culled on the Col de Saisies. Teams have industrial washing machines installed in the side of their buses. The organisers hire dedicated artists to adapt the penises spray-painted on to the course into rabbits and owls and even the odd Eiffel Tower. This is the first year with free media wifi. There is even an official sausage partner.

Between the travel and the sheer scale, no sporting event is more exhausting or discombobulating to follow. When I arrive ahead of stage 17, the press pack are already friendly ghosts, low on clean clothes and lower on morale. Two nights in the same grotty aparthotel is a rare privilege.

All in all, 4,500 people have traversed France making this happen, preparing the same canapés, laying out and packing up the same road barriers, playing the same Eurotrash on the same diamante violin. The novelty of the circus wears off when you have to perform every day for three weeks, but fans emerge every day with the same vigour and fever, fresh eyes and hearts.

In the middle of the chaos is a slightly-built lunatic with a patchy tan and an awkward smile. Tadej Pogačar will win his fourth Tour de France in Paris today, an inevitability the past three weeks have only served to rubberstamp. He has suggested this course was designed as a monument to his few previous failures, peaks which have either broken or at the very least tested him before – Hautcacam, Mont Ventoux, Col de la Loze. And yet he will win by more than four minutes, with more than 20 minutes between him and sixth. Only 12 riders are likely to complete the whole Tour within an hour of his mark. Pogačar’s victory has been brilliant yet bloodless. Jonas Vingegaard, a two-time Tour winner and Pogačar’s only real competition, has not won a stage.

“Personally I find it really exciting watching Pogačar,” Ineos Grenadiers director of sport Zak Dempster said. “We should all be grateful we live in a generation where we’re seeing it.”

When a rival team is just pleased to share Pogačar’s air, you begin to understand his dominance. His excellence is so unparalleled that not winning the final two mountain stages at Courchevel and La Plagne comprises a mini-crisis. Maybe he is letting someone else win (highly unlikely).

Maybe he is bored and burned out – on Thursday he said: “This is the point where I ask myself: ‘Why am I still here?’” Maybe this has taken more out of him than he will publicly admit (almost certainly). Maybe he is only human (unconfirmed).

Oscar Onley, the elfin 22-year-old Scot, has emerged as a future Tour contender to finish fourth, riding for a Dutch team he has saved from relegation. Irishman Ben Healy wore the yellow jersey as late as stage 11. Kevin Vauquelin has established himself as a home hope, 40 years on from the last French winner.

Pogačar’s mastery should be the all-encompassing story of this race, but cycling’s seemingly eternal cloud still finds a way to block the sunlight, to rain on his parade. The Tour’s breakout star is David Rozman, head carer at Ineos Grenadiers. Rozman’s alleged text messages with convicted doping doctor Mark Schmidt from 2012 were published by German broadcaster ARD, including one which read: “Do you still have any of the stuff that Milram used during the races? If so, can you bring it for the boys?”

Milram were a German cycling team disbanded in 2010 after multiple positive doping tests.

Rozman was working for what was then Team Sky, as well as British cycling, and would go on to work closely with Chris Froome throughout his four Tour de France wins. He left the Tour last week and has stepped back from his role to be interviewed by the International Testing Agency, but had still been working until then.

An Ineos statement said they had commissioned “a thorough review by an external law firm” and had “acted responsibly and with due process”, but Dave Brailsford, recently reinstalled as Grenadiers CEO, appears to have taken a public vow of silence 15 years too late. There is something comforting as fans and journalists slip into the old assumptions and accusations. Attempting to free yourself from the long shadow of the past becomes increasingly difficult when you cannot tell where the past ends and the present begins.

Pogačar is trapped within a paradox of his own success: the better he gets, the more he achieves, the more people are convinced he must be doping. Is humanity progressing or cheating? Is there a threshold of success that can only be achieved by doping, even without evidence, and what is it? These questions are as cruel yet irrepressible as Pogačar’s talent, which he understands. “There is no confidence, and we can do nothing about it,” he said last year. “We practise our sport and hope that people will believe us again.” He also understands that a golden generation cannot become a golden age when wider public sentiment has descended into blanket apathy, so often has cycling fooled its most ardent believers.

This has become Schrödinger’s sport, simultaneously as clean as it has ever been and yet every rider is a potential doper. Cognitive dissonance is the consequence of trust being eroded so often and so dramatically, a reputation so tarnished and fractured that it largely attracts only people who want to believe in the value of pure human endeavour.

But Pogacar now represents the hope of a better sport, of a better humanity. His output statistics suggest he would wipe the floor with all your favourite dopers, as would Vingegaard. There is both a beauty and tragedy in improved science, eating and sleeping better, better understanding fuelling and physics, potentially being the answer previous generations ruined lives and careers searching for. If anything, this equates to financial doping from the richest teams to afford better chefs, advice and bikes, but that’s far easier to make peace with in a sporting landscape soaked in cash.

And so despite everything, the Tour has somehow maintained its fundamental romanticism, testament to the simplicity of its innate beauty. It has future-proofed itself by becoming about more than cycling, a pilgrimage and tradition passed through families, the French summer made manifest. For the sport’s sadistic obsession with enduring pain – post-war great Fausto Coppi once said: “Cycling is suffering” – everyone is here because they believe two wheels is the ideal mode of transportation to their own nirvana.

Cycling is gambling with your bodies and minds in pursuit of a higher cause, a higher sense of satisfaction, facing one extreme of your humanity to unlock another, understanding you can only truly appreciate heaven if you have seen hell.

Thousands follow along on their own bikes, hoping to replicate something of that rapture for themselves. Cycling keeps finding its breaking point, and yet it also keeps persevering.

Photo by Tim de Waele/Getty Images