Background noise in the trenches

The Tour’s only flat time trial ends with Evenepoel’s victory, Pogačar taking the yellow jersey, and Vingegaard's collapse through landscapes that shaped the course of the Second World War

There’s a recurring sense of contempt among my friends and family when it comes to cycling. For them, cycling is little more than a background noise between July and September—just the distant hum of a helicopter that encourages a post-lunch siesta. I don’t usually rise to it: I’m not here to evangelise or help the sport “grow”, as if I were some kind of UCI sales rep.

But if I ever had to sit down and talk about it seriously, I’d focus on the sporting action itself—and on how everything can suddenly explode and shift after hours of quiet simmering. In that sense, it’s not so different from most football matches, right?

But above all, I’d talk about cycling’s aesthetic superiority as a sport. It might sound a little pretentious, but if you are reading this, you probably know that it’s the truth.

All of us who’ve worked on the social media for bike races have at some point used that line about “the world’s greatest stadiums” to describe the stunning backdrops of mountains, valleys, cliffs or endless forests. What we don’t mention as often is how being a travelling circus allows the sport to pass through places that have shaped history. How it brings cycling right to people’s doorsteps and—at least for now—maintains a popular character in a sport where the main piece of equipment costs what an average person earns in half a year.

We’ve seen Dunkirk, Omaha and the Norman landscapes so many times in popular culture that they feel familiar, even if we’ve never set foot there. That the Tour de France can visit places where history was made—and use them to tell and create stories of its own—is something no other sport can truly claim. Though I may never end up telling any of this to my friends.

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