TV VIEW:The peloton snaked 191 kilometres from Limoux to Foix yesterday. Eurosport flashed up an aerial shot of the mountain range, the mist on top and the road, barely visible. Stage 14 of the Tour de France and the yellow jersey leader Bradley Wiggins has been in the saddle for 59 hours 32 minutes and 32 seconds.

“Rolling, hard countryside with some appalling road surfaces. Lots of hills and castles. It’s a tough day today,” said Eurosport commentator David Harmon, who Seán Kelly in his distinctive brogue kindly admonished some minutes later for being “too easy” on the riders.

Kelly, as he was as a competitor, is no trifling analyst. Never one to break into the giddy octaves, his voice maintained an even modulation and uncompromising accent – “Torty five seconds.” When Kelly declared in his understated way that the kid in the green jersey called Peter Sagan is a good cyclist you take a mental note of the 22-year-old.

The guy in the yellow jersey was good too. Wiggins, though, was looking forward to the final ride into Paris. “A week to go. This time next week I’ll be drinking vodka tonic,” said the Briton. Guardian writer William Fotheringham pointed out that regardless of taste, vodka tonic was the drink of choice because the nutritionist told them it had the lowest calories.

There were also some foreboding words from Harmon, who was reading an interview in French sports newspaper L’Equipe which ran a full page interview with Chris Froome, another of the British riders in the Sky team along with Wiggins and Mark Cavendish.

“Look at this,” chirped Harmon. “Chris Froome says ‘I can win this tour but not with Sky’.” A confused panel then wondered aloud why he had just signed a three-year contract with them.

“All is not well in Team Sky,” added the Eurosport man as the cameras cut to 15 French fans doing a “roly poly” routine in a field and a battalion of camper vans parked on the side of the road with picnicing French men and women sitting on their fold-up chairs patiently waiting for the flash of luminous sunglasses, bicycle chains and Peugeots with men hanging out the windows and 15 bikes fixed to the roof rack.

The mood music this year in cycling is light and cheerful and the commentary team added to that with no small sense of self-effacing humour.

“There’s lots of wild boar in this part of the world,” said Harmon, pausing momentarily, “which must sound absolutely appropriate for people who have been listening to us.”

They continued the knock around banter as the riders began to rise out of their seats with the increased gradients, while the rain and mountain mist began to swallow them up.

The vibe in the sport seems more “luvin’ and less loathin” than before. It appears to be that the grimy past has been forgiven or at least pushed into the background far enough for it not to impose itself into this year’s vibe, or any of the studio discussions.

Still, large leaps of faith are required to look at the Tour de France as a clean race and it’s a moot point whether people trust the riders again, whether they believe in the teams and understand such a savage physical demand can be successfully endured on pasta and chicken.

The challenge is whether cycling can get people to accept that the petulance and arrogant defiance, all the lies and cover-ups, duplicity and ultimately deaths of some of the drug-addled riders of the late 1990s and early 2000s have been purged from the sport.

That’s not to say there was no naughtiness. Frenchman Pierre Rolland ripped up the unwritten rule book when he broke away and attacked during a mountain decent while Australian Cadel Evans threw his hands in the air and huffed and puffed as a service car wound its way to the summit to give him a new back wheel after the first of his three punctures. Then everyone was, well, deflating which prompted the studio sabotage theory. The notion that “something” was going on took flight.

“Very strange. When you see so many punctures . . .” said Kelly. Sure enough word came back from one of the service cars. Tacks on the road. Lordy, wilful, deliberate subversion of Le Peloton. Cavendish may have publicly stated that the sport is clean and that riders are “on their hands and knees” after a race and that no one is “bouncing around”. He has been tested 60 times a year over the last three years.

Still, with all those flat tyres, cycling appears to still have it critics.