The tour is Rubbish. There I’ve said it. It’s junk, forget it. Oh sure there was a time when it was interesting, but now? Give me a break.

Now call me old fashioned, but I consider a bike race to be over when the riders stop racing. Oh no, that’s not good enough for Christian Prudhomme he wants his race to last till October. And so we have the ridiculous spectacle of riders driving across Europe throughout the Autumn exchanging jerseys and winners bouquets as they discover they were no longer the winner of the longest mountain stage in this years race.

I don’t take the damn thing seriously and there’s no reason why you Mr and Ms average cycling fan should either. So am I alone? Is a lone blogger the only voice of reason? I don’t think so…….

Do the journalists who cover the race take it seriously? Of course not, for the average jurno Le Tour is an excuse to get loaded on free wine and grow fat on the local produce, none of them actually see the race live, they all sit in the press room watching the drama unfold on giant TV screens whilst eating gateau and quaffing chateau.

What about The riders? Come on, say to the average man in the street, hey, how would you like a job where you can consume 6000 calories a day and take all the drugs you like? You’d have a queue forming. Are the riders any different? Of course they’re not, in fact just looking at them you can see they need ‘feeding up’, as my Mum used to say.

So the TV stations then? Come on are you being serious? What do TV execs love above all else? Ratings that’s what. What are the most popular shows on TV? Soap Operas and Docu Soaps. Well that’s the Tour in one. Tune in and see skinny climbers begin chased through the streets by fat cops, tune in and see riders in tears as they talk of pressure and regret, tune in and see the star of the show hounded by the press and the paparazzi.

Team manager maybe? Have you ever met a cycling team manager? No? Well I have and I have lived to tell the tale. Will Armstrong become a team manager? Did Hinault become a team manager? Does Merckx spend his days behind the wheel of a Skoda with bikes on the roof? No, no and no. They all had enough publicity during their time as racers, they all got sick of cameras and questions, they got fed up with telling riders what to do.

Being a team manager is a way of filling the days until retirement, a way of enhancing the pension fund, a way of getting a little of the publicity you never managed during your racing days. A chance to hit the big time, and what could propel you to be a big time media personality? Well noting beats having a doper on the team, guaranteed hours of publicity and media interviews and above all a chance to practice those amateur dramatics that you just don’t get time for now a days.

So all the fans then? Cone on, not all of them? Turn on the TV and take a look at any mountainside as Le Tour passes by. You’ll see hundreds of thousands of people cheering and celebrating the race. But spend a little time at the road side and you get a truer picture.

What, may I ask, gets the average fans more excited, watching the great, the good and the scum of world cycling toil on crazy gradients in tropical heat? Or Having small plastic toys and pizzeria discount vouchers thrown at them? How many spectators are injured by speeding cyclists each year? One or two, how many are injured fighting for a packet of Haribo that has been thrown into the road? A hospital waiting room full, that’s how many. I’ve stood by the road side at le Tour, oh, maybe 70 or 80 times and I’ll tell you that there are less people there when the riders go by than when le caravane publicitaire rolls on by.

Go to the Alps and see the all night partying, go to the Pyrenees and see dozens of unconscious drunks as the race rolls by, are they taking it seriously? Well they’re taking the booze seriously.

So the press? The riders? The fans? The team Managers? The TV stations? Who does that leave? Yep the Organizers.

Do the organisers take the Tour seriously? Of course they bloody well don’t.
Pretty much from day one they realised it was turning from drama into farce. Have a look at the history books if you don’t believe me. Take 1904, the riders spend more time on trains than on their bikes. In fact the first couple of decades of the race were more of an excuse for regional differences to be settled that for running a bike race.

A competition to see which department of France could produce the biggest band of thugs, cut-throats and street fighters, is not something the organisers could take seriously.
Trouble was that once they had started they couldn’t stop. Loss of face would be too much for Henri Desgrange to bare . So in an effort to have the race stopped he introduced a series of more and more bizare rules in the hope that someone would stop him. You have to ride one of our bikes, have a mechanical problem? You have to carry your bike across a mountain pass and learn how to become a blacksmith before you can fix it, you can’t sit behind another rider, you can only eat the food we give you.

Come on there rules are seriously taking the piss, Desgrange knew it 100 years ago and we know it today.

So who takes it seriously then? No one, that’s who. So why should you.