Domestiqué

Tour de France 2025

Friday 11 July: Stage 7 Saint-Malo - Mûr-de-Bretagne
By car: 0 km
By bike: 0 km

Tat: One of the holy trinity of T-shirts - though they insist on calling it a ‘Total Énergies maillot’.

A hard-fought day on the streets of Dinan - lots of very ‘enthusiastic’ pensioners and general public on narrow pavements. Lots of tat thrown out, but lots of jostling for it. An LCL hat finally (I also got a TE hat), balsamic vinaigrette, Cofidis buff, an X.TRA T-shirt (washing liquid), and other assorted tat that I swapped for an FDJ bag. Grab as much you can and then barter 😂

The Tour goes straight through the centre of Dinan, and it looked a good place to stay when planning last November. So it proved. I hadn’t been to this area before, and the town is beautiful. It’s the place that’s made the most impression so far on the mobile travelogue advert which is the Tour de France. It’s well worth a return visit. 

 My appartement is literally less than a hundred steps to the route (I counted them 😁), so I’m watching in a very urban French way today - hang around for the Caravan tat, go home for lunch, watch the Tour on TV, back out to watch the riders go by, and then see the finish on TV. 

It’s funny how little things can get you down travelling like this. Yesterday I realised I had lost my ear buds, probably in Caen. They were getting a bit old, and I have another set at home, but it’s annoying. And then I got to the appartement, and the washing machine I was relying on wouldn’t work. Furious messaging to the owner, but no resolution. So I went out to find the laverie automatique and get something to eat. Moules crème and frites. You know you’re in France when they proudly boast exactly where your food comes from. I found the laverie and resigned myself to a 7am wash trip this morning.

After my moules I got chatting to the E.Leclerc caravan team - there’s nearly as many of them as they have T-shirts. And like Lidl Trek, they have a full branded uniform - hat, t-shirts, socks, and trainers. They are all staying in the Ibis hotel in the main square, and have to be up early in the morning to drive to St Malo. I get back to the appartement and decide to try and plug the washing machine into another socket, just in case. Success! It does mean having the machine halfway across the bathroom, but it also means clean underwear. Apologies to the people below who had the suffer the machine spinning at 11:30pm last night.

This morning was far better, up and out. My ear buds had slipped down behind the driver’s seat - success. My washing was almost dry - success. I remembered there was a Total Énergies service station up the road, and sure enough there was a spinning wheel to win tat - though the woman running it was making sure everyone won. Walked out with a T-shirt and hat - success.

Dinan looked both beautiful and full for the Caravan. With lots of people and narrow pavements there was plenty of scrambling around. The emergency services also join in the Caravan - the police, the roads services, the Blood service. All get clapped, but it’s noticeable that the Saveurs Pompiers (fire and rescue service) always get huge applause from very young and old alike.

Back for lunch - with a beer, as unusually I wasn’t driving. And then back to see the Tour - with Geraint Thomas in a surprise breakaway at the front. A quick mention of the regional speciality I picked up this morning - a kouign-amann. A buttery millefeuille pastry cooked until it’s a crunchy, sticky, caramelised heaven. It’s now my all-time favourite pastry. I don’t know how many it’s wise to eat though 😁

A good day.

Catching the bidon

In 2021, cycling’s governing body, the UCI, brought out some new rules on water bottles - “bidons”. Worried at the images of well over a thousand plastic bidons tossed into the countryside each day, they banned the practice of riders simply throwing bidons away. Bidons used by professionals have always been prized items by fans, and they used to go to great lengths to retrieve them from ravines or between passing team cars. If you were very lucky and the peloton was moving slowly enough, a rider might hand you a bidon (bored riders did also use fans as target practice). Initially all the empty bidons had to be taken back to the team cars on fear of a fine or even disqualification. This soon became impractical, and the riders’ rubbish disposal areas (for gel wrappers, etc) became more numerous and also bidon disposal areas. This worked better, but the fans were still clamouring for bidons. And like any bad law, exemptions and blind eyes eventually crept in. The UCI became more lax in the interpretation of its law, and introduced some weasel-word exemptions about bidons being able to be given to fans if it was safe to do so. And very soon we got back to teams tossing bidons away again, albeit with more in the rubbish disposal zone, or areas where there were lots of fans.

Which brings me to a new phenomenon on this year’s Tour, that I think I can pinpoint to one particular person. On stage two (Sunday) French tv caught the image of a man holding up a big hoop with netting on the inside with ‘bidons please’ written in card around it. They were so transfixed they repeated the sequence twice in five minutes; I’ve certainly never seen this brilliant idea either on the TV or on the course before.

By the next morning the schoolchildren of Billy-Berclau had fashioned a couple, telling me they had seen it on TV last night. Every day since I’ve seen more and more appear, some very homemade, some obviously having spent a great deal of time on them. Spectators have also realised it’s a useful concept for The Caravan, and so many people are now turning up with large open cardboard boxes to catch tat in. It’s very much this year’s thing.

 

 

 

Likely spot me tomorrow at : I’ll be watching at the start in Saint-Méen-le-Grand

Tomorrow's T-shirt: Black Philosophy Football 100 Years of the Tour

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