Tour de Facts

<< Mark Cavendish: "Ah, what's the point?"

It's a fine summer's day today, and while we British may have nothing better to do than swelter in offices while our youths slip away on the balmy breeze, across the Channel, millions of people find the time to stand at the foot of a mountain and whoop at passing cyclists. That's right, the Tour de France is in full swing - we were but two hours away by car whilst on holiday, but driving to watch the world's greatest cycle race seemed a bit off. Initially, my burgeoning enjoyment of le Tour felt like the final passage into irretrievable sporting geekdom, but I have since realised that I'm way past that point already, and anyway, there's a lot to love.

For one, there's the lovely scenery - better than the fat builders' convention that passes for a backdrop at a football match anyway. Secondly, there's the fact that it may be the hardest sports event on Earth to win - a British rider, Mark Cavendish, has won four stages at this year's Tour, yet was so monumentally far from victory that he decided to pack it in altogether. Finally, you get a jumper for winning stuff. I wish my work did that - a polka dot sweater for the neatest filing cabinet drawer would really boost morale. The one down side, of course, is that some bad apples like to get a little boost from the lab, and in fact, entire teams are sometimes put under suspicion, and removed from the race, subsequently casting a shadow of foul play over each and every participant. Never mind that, just look at the mountains.



Speaking of which (wow, this is segueing like a proper sports report - just call me John Inverdale without the dubious racial stereotypes; John for short) the peloton (they have a made-up word for the group of riders - that's almost as cool as Skull Man) are heading towards the Alps, and the peaks, which are all known as 'cols'. Col de Cousteau, Col de Mangetout, Col de Johnny Halliday, they're all there. I had thought this had meant 'mountain' or 'peak', forgetting about Page 1 of my 'Parlez-vouz Francais?' textbook, which would have informed me that mountain is of course 'mont'. This is what 'col' means:



'Col' is the French word for a mountain pass.



The cols that the riders have to conquer are graded from 1 to 4, 1 being the most treacherous, except that the very hardest climbs are rated as being higher than 1, which seems fairly ridiculous, given that the purpose of any grading system is to cover from the biggest to the smallest. Have the mountains grown since the system came into being? Unbelievable. The most frequently traversed pass in Tour history is the Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees, which has been climbed 47 times in all, and stands very much 'hors categorie' at 2km above sea level. The idea of climbing it on a pushbike and then careening down the other side of it sounds more like punishment than sport to me, but each to their own.