You’re Never Alone On The Tour

Tour de France 2025

Thursday 17 July: Stage 12 Auch - Hautacam
By car: 103 km
By bike: 0 km

Tat: Can of Tourtel, LCL hat, Krys hat

Stage 10, Tour de France 2020. The Tour had been delayed, and ran in a Covid window in early September. I was alone in a fairly quiet area of forest in Charente-Maritime, a few kilometres after the feed zone. As the rear of the peloton passes, one of those small cans of Coke lands near my feet, and then another one. It was obvious I was being used as target practice. I guess life gets boring if you have to spend day after day at the back of the peloton. 

And so I’m aiming to spend another « un tour seul » today. Going to the top of an uncategorised climb, and just watch the race go by. I might even be one of those solo spectators you see on TV. 

Ha, ha, ha…   An anonymous uncategorised climb in the middle of the countryside. I managed to park a couple of hundred metres away, but it was already filling up, and the French had got their picnic tables up, and the beer and wine was flowing. I found a spot and settled down, and got chatting with my neighbour.

 Soon I was being offered beers, food and cakes. Make the effort and the French will pay you back handsomely. When we I left I thanked them all again for their hospitality, and their only concern was that I had had a good time. I’ll never meet those people again, but their warmth will stay long in my heart.

I started off in the extreme NE of France, now I’m down in the Pyrenees, in the depths of the SW. I’ve completed one diagonal. On my way down I passed Tarbes Ossun airport, where old, and not so old aircraft go to die. It was very sad to see around 20 Airbus A380s in various states of mothballing, or even being broken up. Many are less than 15 years old.

View from my bedroom window 

There were plenty of camping cars on the road to Tarbes yesterday - today was packed out with them. Where the teams proudly display lions or that strange Skoda animal [it’s a bobcat] camping cars have TdF route arrows, torn down after the stage. The organisers never need to clear these away  

An old man rants

Stage 8 finished in Laval. Which got me thinking - I was sure ALFA LAVAL used to be a major sponsor of the Tour, in the 1980s (?) And what was the connection with Laval? It turns out there’s no connection with the town. Alfa Laval is a Swedish company, and at the end of the 19th century they invented the cream separator, which saved hours of laborious work. Throughout most of the early and mid 20th century their name was ubiquitous with dairy farming, and I’m sure they also sold associated dairy equipment and barriers, etc. Whatever, milk processing became centralised, and they’re now a heavy engineering company.

The next day on Stage 9, Mathieu Van der Poel (hereafter referred to as MVdP) staged an audacious breakaway for most of the day, only to be caught with 750 metres of the race remaining. I remember in the 2000s a few breakaway riders (including Tony Martin?) either being caught or winning just on the line.

So why the rant ? I wanted to refer to both of these in the blog. An Internet search was the obvious thing. The Alfa Laval one was easier - plenty about the company. But nothing about Tour de France sponsorship. Putting “Alfa Laval Tour de France sponsorship” into a search engine just produced loads of references to Stage 8 2025. Similarly “Tour de France breakaways caught on the line” just gave me loads of Stage 9 links.

So I turned to the new-fangled AI that everyone is talking about, and Google is bombarding me with adverts. I also downloaded ChatGPT. And the results of this wondrous new technology? Just a series of anodyne general statements about the Tour de France and sprinters. What I really wanted to ask (and in the end did try) was the sort of question you would ask a group of cycling mates: “Do you remember, about twenty years ago, there was a series of breakaways that either just succeeded or just failed, can’t remember which. I think some of them involved Tony Martin”. Now, in the pub or cafe, around the table, there would be a whole series of close finishes recounted through the ages. Artificial Intelligence searches completely failed. Just those same, strangely AI-obvious responses. I’ve no doubt (in fact I know) that AI can be an enormously useful tool in many situations. But until it can equal the collective knowledge of a group of mates sat round a table, I’m not going to worry that much about it taking over the world.

Likely spot me tomorrow at : Around the middle of the Contre le Montre course

Tomorrow's T-shirt: Stockport County 22/23 away shirt [looks like Argentina] 

What’s this all about ? New readers start here

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