Taking French leave to witness summer's big race

Paris Letter: When the cyclists of the Tour de France slipped beneath the Eiffel Tower on Sunday, they launched the 100th anniversary celebration of a part of the country's heritage as quintessentially French as baguette and Camembert, writes Lara Marlowe 

Yet no one seems to mind that a Frenchman hasn't won the championship for 18 years.

In the minds of the French, the Tour de France marks the cut-off point between the working year and the farniente of the summer. It is evocative of picnic coolers, afternoon siestas and Bastille Day. With 700,000 people lining French roadsides every day for the three-week contest - some 20 million spectators altogether - it is the best-attended sports event in the world. And it's free, with the scenery of France as a back-drop.

Authors as disparate as Alfred Jarry, Colette and Louis Aragon immortalised the Tour in their books. The communist newspaper l'Humanité has printed many of their texts in a 115-page special issue, "The Tour 1903-2003; A History of France". The semiologist Roland Barthes, for example, called the Tour "the best example we have ever met of a total myth". In a less pretentious vein, the writer Louis Nucéra, a cycling enthusiast who was killed when a motorist knocked him down three years ago, called the Tour de France "Christmas in July" and pointed out that vélo (bike in French) is an anagram of love.

The introduction of the first paid holidays in 1936 added to the Tour's popularity. But its appeal extends beyond the working classes. The Academician Jean d'Ormesson's aristocratic grand-father and aunt Gabrielle were devotees. Perhaps his grand-father conferred "the taste of his ancestors for duels and tournaments" on the cycling contest, d'Ormesson wrote. As for his tante Gabrielle, "It was popular snobbery after chic snobbery; the strong odour of the crowd after the refinement of small groups, sausage and red wine after the champagne and caviar she'd had her fill of in the spring in Paris."

The legend of the Tour is based on pain as well as glory. On Sunday, the American cyclist Tyler Hamilton fractured his shoulder in a pile-up. To the world's amazement, Hamilton continued on Monday. Even Eddy "the Cannibal" Merckx, the five-time Belgian champion who completed the Tour with a broken jawbone in 1975, said Hamilton's feat was "impossible". Libération called Hamilton "the man who suffers in silence" and concluded from his performance, as well as the miraculous comeback of the former cancer victim Lance Armstrong, who has won the Tour for the past four years, that "the Americans definitely have something more".

There are also brave losers. In 1934, René Vietto was in the lead when he gave his front wheel to a team-mate whose wheel had broken. Raymond Poulidor participated in 14 Tours de France, but never won, inspiring a book entitled Glory without the Yellow Jersey. Poulidor was a close friend of the five-time winner Jacques Anquetil. From his deathbed in 1987, Anquetil told Poulidor: "Raymond, I'm sorry. You're going to come in second again." Anquetil was a French hero, but he scandalised the 1967 Tour by telling France Dimanche newspaper: "Yes, I doped myself. A champion cannot do otherwise. Anyone who says the contrary is a hypocrite."

As early as 1924, the great French journalist Albert Londres revealed the scourge of the Tour in an interview with the Pélissier brothers, who were abandoning the race to go back to the Renault factory. In the first public admission of doping, Henri Pélissier told Londres that the race was a greater trial than the Stations of the Cross. "You want to see how we keep going? Look..." Pélissier pulled a vial from his bag. "That's cocaine for the eyes; that's chloroform for the gums..."

"And look at the pills," another cyclist added as they produced three little boxes each. "We keep going with 'dynamite'," Francis Pélissier said. At night, they "danced the jig" in their hotel rooms, rather than sleeping.

A doping scandal and the exclusion of the Festina team in 1998 nearly destroyed the Tour. Jean-Marie Leblanc, its director, says that crisis is over, but that "you will never, alas, see a sport that is 100 per cent pure and beyond reproach". Speaking to Le Monde, he accused newspapers of "spreading the venom" of continued suspicion of doping.

The only scandal so far this year was Mr Leblanc's agreement with the Basque separatist group Batasuna to post signs in Basque as well as French, and to employ Basque announcers. Spanish authorities, who consider Batasuna terrorists, were furious.

But whatever happens between now and July 27th, you can be sure there will be huge crowds to cheer the Tour de France when cyclists complete "the big loop" with a triumphal ride past the Tuileries, the Place de la Concorde and up the Champs-Élysées.