Episode 14 - The Tour de France

Episode 14: The Tour de France – More than a race. Less than the truth.

“You can't ride the Tour de France on mineral water. You would have to be an imbecile or a crook to imagine that a pro-cyclist who races for 235 days a year can hold the pace without stimulants.”

Jacques Anquetil, five-time Tour de France winner

It is without doubt the greatest cycling race in the world – just don’t ask what’s in the water bottles. Legends are everywhere, but clean ones are harder to find. Where endurance meets amphetamines, pain meets painkillers, and a yellow jersey rarely means a clear conscience, the Tour de France is a race fuelled as much by scandal as it is by glory – and yet, somehow, it never disappoints.

Because here’s the thing – what these riders do is superhuman. They exceed the limits of what a body should withstand. They suffer more in three weeks than most of us would choose in a lifetime. Just to ride in the Tour takes obsession, discipline, and pain tolerance most can’t fathom. To win it takes something else entirely – whatever that something may be.

For much of its history, drug use in cycling wasn’t a dirty secret – it was an open one. Riders took whatever gave them the edge: from ether and strychnine to amphetamines, morphine, and later EPO. Cheating didn’t always stop at the syringe, either. But in 1967, near the summit of the brutal Mont Ventoux, Britain’s Tom Simpson collapsed and died – the price of pushing too far. It should have been a reckoning. It wasn’t.

Twenty years later, cyclists started dying in their sleep. Nothing changed. In 1998, the Festina Affair blew the sport wide open. And yet, the very next year, the Tour was reborn – branded Le Tour de Renouveau – The Tour of Renewal. What it delivered was Lance Armstrong.

So why do we love it?

That’s the question Jack and Ben ask this week. Because whether it fills you with joy, disgust, awe or disbelief – the Tour de France is a spectacle you can’t look away from. It’s beautiful. It’s brutal. It’s broken. And maybe, just maybe, that’s what makes it so human.