Le Tour shows us its teeth

Yesterday there was a little more savagery, a little more pain. Le Tour began to show its teeth and bite a little at the legs and the nerves.

After the Saturday's prologue people sensed the urgency. Lining the climb up to and over the exotically-named Col de Wicklow they bayed and cheered and whooped in the way that is expected on Tour de France mountain-top stages. Ireland replaced the glaciers and peaks of the Alps and Pyrenees with rolling hills and horizons that were softer on the eye.

In the city crowds were no different. A capital cut loose from its moorings was revolving around the race. Crowds gathered where their instincts told them that the riders would slow down - corners, hills and bends became small populations of Tour activity.

It was a novelty. A fantastic brush stroke of colour chasing across the east of Ireland. People looked on, often in ignorance of what was really happening but unafraid to swing into the festival feel whether in Woodenbridge, Arklow, Blessington, Holywood or Dublin. Curiosity, too, gripped.

"Look at him," said one Dublin woman referring to the ferrity, shaven-headed Italian climber, Marco Pantani. "To look at him you'd bring him home for a dinner."

There were those who simply wanted to look at the most powerful clavicle muscles in sport. Shaven and burnished by both sun and gravelly departures from their bikes, their scooped musculature was a monument to unforgiving distances and rations of pain dished out on a daily basis.

There were those, too, who wallowed in the avalanche of statistics. The 102 vehicles and the bus 15 metres long. The press grandstand 33 metres long and seven metres high. An inflatable podium 16 metres across the front and nine metres deep. Two ambulances and 200 people at work. And that was only the finish line.

Tarnished, perhaps, by the shadow of drugs and the arrest of a Belgian masseur from the Festina team, the Tour rumbled on. It is too big to stop. Too much momentum to even slow down. So vigorous it has a life of its own. Into the Phoenix Park, and the sprinters jockeyed their way to the front after 180 kilometres of cat and mouse. A gasp as five fell, taking out Mario Cipollini, the great Italian sprinter, leaving Belgian Tom Steels to grind his way to the finish a whisker in front of the posse.

Enniscorthy to Cork today and it will start all over again. Then 19 more stages before the finish. The hardest race on earth and it's called a tour. Black humour indeed.