The Tour de France is an experience to behold

It was that great American truth seeker, Bo Jackson, who once famously asked, “Where is that Tour de France, anyhow?” The answer, unlike Bo, remains a continuous curiosity and with careful rummaging can still be located, somewhere outside Orleans at last report.

It seems a strange conceit to be proud of the fact that your country is small enough to ride entirely around on a bicycle. Here the race would be the Tour de Montana. But Le Tour is the French’s baby, a moral crusade for sport. It says so right in the literature.

My experience with the thing can be summed up easily; loved the food, hated Le Tour. I covered it during the days of Lance Armstrong, being there for four of his seven wins, now blanks on the official winners list, a distinction otherwise reserved for world wars.

Armstrong did not kill Le Tour any more than Barry Bonds killed baseball, but there is no avoiding the fact that neither sport has been the same since. We are wiser now, and gambling has filled the gap where emotion used to reign.

In almost all modern sports, cheating is taken for granted. Guilt is assumed and innocence must be verified. Come to think of it, that is pretty much all of modern life, as any airline passenger will tell you.

But bicycle racing shamed itself beyond all others, from the beginning when for some misguided reason even strychnine was thought to be a benefit. Because the idea is just so loony, the doing of it so hard, mere mortals naturally seek any help they can get away with.

The story goes that the first biker to make it over the Pyrenees shook his fist at the checkpoint shouting, “You are murderers, every one of you, murderers.”

The Tour de France was invented by a newspaperman, which is not necessarily a French thing to do. Our baseball All-Star Game came about the same way, and so did the baseball Hall of Fame.

I once worked in the very building where they began. The building where the Tour was hatched is gone and the newspaper itself did not last as long as the event, a fate that may be in the balance here as well. The way things are going there could be All-Star Games long after there are newspapers around to report them.

The originating editor of Le Tour had the notion that the race should be so difficult that an ideal finish would have only one biker left at the end. NASCAR has the same business model.

My lasting recollection of Le Tour is of taking the fast train from Paris to Bordeaux in order to experience the race like any ordinary Frenchman. I bought a baguette and bicycled out to a dusty two-lane road to catch the race.

I recall huge cardboard hands being used as cooling fans, helpful because instead of the single finger as in America, all five fingers were extended, the standard Gallic palm. The hand was sponsored by a string of betting shops.

I stopped at a “kiosques officiel.” Being sold out of the back of a van were garish yellow umbrellas and yellow hats, the kind Gilligan used to wear on the island, with the official Le Tour symbol.

Yellow is the color of the Tour de France. Sunflower yellow. Safety yellow. Jersey yellow. There is no way to make the color yellow fashionable. Even in France.

French police in their coffee can hats walked along with night sticks, keeping unnecessary order. Voices were happy and anxious. Estimates are that 15 million people still do this during the three weeks of Le Tour, the greatest individual audience of any sporting event anywhere.

Then suddenly official vehicles rushed past me, part of the jangling parade that is the Tour de France, one long, long infomercial. Here came the Swiss water car. And then the France telephone car. The bank car, the tire car, the official sausage car, with a large waving pig sticking out through the sunroof.

The bikers came, the bikers went, just a blur. The whole thing was over in 17 seconds. Something for baseball to think about.