A Vet's View of Le Tour

WHAT: Bob Roll’s The Tour de France Companion HOW MUCH: $10.95 WHERE: quality book stores (Workman Publishing)

Hearing La Grande Boucle, Le Tour, or even its formal name, Tour de France causes me to affect the most stilted of French accents, ditch my baggies for some spandex and take off on my road bike while gnawing away at the baguette clenched in my teeth.

For many of us this is a perfectly understandable reaction. The Tour is after all the single most essential three weeks of bicycling, hands down. Whether you’re a hucker, a single-track fiend, BMX rider, or daily commuter you have to pay reverence to the Tour and the 2,100 grueling miles the few, select riders put themselves through during the hottest month of the year.

Unfortunately the race happens no less than 8 time zones away leaving us in America the scraps of edited coverage spliced and diced to fit in an hour-long recap during waking hours.

The truly blessed are lucky enough to travel to the continent and take in the race first hand. For the rest of us, Bob Roll has written a guide to the Tour de France that pushes beyond the limits of OLN’s coverage and truly takes the reader through the race; from the prologue, to powering up l’Alpe d’Huez, to ripping up the that final spectators-lined gauntlet, jockeying for position as we sprint to victory under the Arc de Triomphe.

In Roll’s book, The Tour de France Companion ($10.95, Workman Publishing), he puts together the sprawling immensity of the Tour in a way only a former competitor could, illuminating this Franco-feat of determination and endurance in a concise and straightforward way.

Bobke, as Roll is known in cycling circles, gives his readers insights that are both thoughtful and shed light on the most mundane, yet vitally important aspects of the race.

He details how a single woman almost cost Lance Armstrong the ’03 Tour on the Luz Ardiden when his handle bar caught the over-zealous fan’s purse straps, sending him flying, while his lead over Jan Ulrich hovered somewhere between infinitesimal and non existent.

An excerpt from the book shows Roll’s all too intimate knowledge of the tour and endurance bicycle racing in general.

What if you have to go to the bathroom? I though you’d never ask. Often riders drift to the back of the peloton during the early, uneventful part of a stage. It’s considered bad form to attack during un naturel, as relief stops are called on Tour radio. If a rider really has to go, and things are popping at the front of the field, he can ride back and be pushed along by a teammate, while he urinates to one side. Be careful not to draft him!

Seriously.

Roll has spent enough time involved with the Tour de France that he has become somewhat of a statesman for the sport, bringing his unique exposure to the race to readers in a more accessible way than Geoffry Wheateroft’s “Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France.” Coming in at about half the page count of Wheateroft’s book, Roll’s guide provides cycling fans with an indispensable volume that is small enough to fit in a jacket pocket.

Each chapter Roll presents tackles another facet of the tour, and he dedicates long, and interesting passages to delving into the tour’s 100+ hear history. Some of the most interesting parts of the book are when Roll recounts an incident that happened 90 years ago that still has prevalence today, such as this except from chapter 4:

In 1913 Eugene Christophe –the French national champion, nicknamed “Cri-Cri” by his fans was leading the tour in the Pyrenees. On the descent of the Tourmalet his front fork cracked. The Frechman shouldered his bike and walked eight miles to the nearest town, Saint-Marie-de-Campan, where he found a blacksmith shop. With race officials watching him, Christophe undertook a four-hour repair. When one official attempted to leave for a quick sandwich, Christophe stared him down, exclaiming, “You’ve made me your prisoner – and now you’re mine. You’ll stay here and eat coal if you’re hungry.”…Astonishingly, the same mechanical problem plagued the French rider again in 1919…Christophe’s reputation as the unluckiest man ever to ride the Tour de France was cemented in 1922 when he broke his fork again.

Christophe’s travails have made him a Tour immortal; the forge in Saint-Marie-de-Campan is now a national monument and a key stop for two-wheeling pilgrims heading into the Pyrenees.

The Tour is after all is as essential to the history of modern France as is the Eiffel Tower or Euro Disney. Well, maybe not Euro Disney. That aside, Roll captures the true essence of the tour with tidbits like that.

But, if anything, Roll’s book is a little Lance-centric, with Armstrong’s name popping up in every chapter. But even that is excusable, since the 7-time tour winner is responsible for getting Americans back into road racing. Roll uses his master’s knowledge of the Tour to compare Armstrong with America’s other great Tour rider, Greg LeMond, which gives you a new perspective on the popular claim that Armstrong truly is the consummate American tour rider – dedicating his entire training season to the tour (a lesson he picked up from LeMond) but pushing the idea further to attain the crushing defeats Armstrong served in his first tour victories.

The only disappointing aspect of this book was that I was one year late getting to it. Roll originally wrote this book as a guide to the tour itself, focusing on the 2003 iteration of the race for current events. In the version I read, Roll had updated it to outline the 2004 race but I still didn’t get to the thing until 2005.

Oh well.

I was lucky enough in 2004 to be living in Germany, so I caught that entire race as it was broadcast live in bars and pubs to thousands of screaming fans. In Germany it was heartbreaking to see Jan Ullrich’s disappointing outing in the tour. It was even more interesting to see young Germans, for whom 2004 was only their 5th or 6th tour experience, rooting solidly for Lance Armstrong who had been the dominant rider through out their lives. Tidbits like this, plus Roll’s unique analysis of the tour experience were indeed missed for 2005 – maybe only because this book has brought the history, competition, and personality of the race in such a neat little package that I could’ve seriously used to sound at least half-way intelligent against those loud-mouthed Europeans for whom the race is as familiar as, well, the damned World Series.

Roll as a former competitor does champion the tour with lofty praise worthy of the Homeric effort, but he does also tackle controversies like dealing with the officials, new and questionable bicycle technologies and the drug usage among riders. He sums up the latter succinctly by explaining since the beginning of the tour riders have been taking caffeine, mint, St. John’s Wort, ampthetamines, and god knows what else to peak their performance and the officials have constantly been on the run trying to stay one step ahead.

This kind of historical perspective plus the authority of Roll himself having completed the amazing race make the book breeze by and the chapters are designed with lots of pictures and insert boxes filled with facts to keep even the most ADD-addled of us interested, but be careful: Every time I opened the book, even if it was the tempest to end all of civilization raging outside, I would become overwhelmed with the guilt of my Trek road bike staring at me on its rack, and I’d be off on another ride.

Whether you’re a salty, old pro or a neophyte eager to learn more about bicycling and the Tour, Bob Roll’s The Tour de France Companion is definitely recommended.