In the mountains, the Tour de France is a long geological journey on pedals

It is by looking up to the sky when you are in the midst of the hills that anticipate the mountains, while you see distant but approaching peaks and ridges that you begin to understand why it is there, above all there, that cycling finds its environment its best form. It wasn’t a given that it would happen. The long century of the bicycle began on the plains and became an ascending novel when it evolved from a means of transport into an exploration tool of human resistance to fatigue and speed.
It is in the mountains that cycling often becomes something memorable, even if lately, with certain people in a group, you don’t even need mountains, just a small incline, a mound, a small hillock, to see shots, inventions, exciting deeds. Yet it is there, in the mountains, especially in the three-week stage races, that cycling understands that it is of the same substance as the mountain, that it is geological, geomorphological, orographic. Sometimes cosmogonic like this Tour de France: wherever it meets a relief – it happened yesterday during the twelfth stage – we get straight to the center of our love for cycling, to the origin of our passion, cosmos, for this sport.

Now the mountains are once again the protagonists of the Grande Boucle, the altitudes from today become more tormented, the scenarios change, the fields become pastures, the trees change, the leaves become needles, the same ones that seem to penetrate under the skin in the calves and quadriceps. in the lungs, giving that sensation of total internal boiling. It starts with the Jura massifthe sinuous grandeur of the Grand Colombier. Then it will be time for Alpsthe green meadows and the blue lakes of the Col de Joux PlaneSaturday, and the rocky peaks of the Dômes de Miage and the Têtes des Bellaval overlooking Domancy and higher Saint-Gervais-les-BainsSunday.

The rocks are an irresistible attraction, they are, with the sea, the only unreachable place for a bicycle. They whisper to those who pedal come and get me. That’s why we get as close to them as possible. Watching a stage race is like watching all the rocks.

Cycling is sedimentary, an overlapping of fatigue sediments and sprints, an accumulation on the bottom of the muscles of attempts that went well and went wrong, of sprints, escapes, falls, chases. And of vanished ambitions, grabbed, that seemed lost and then, sometimes, reappear when hopes had disappeared.

Cycling is volcanic, an explosion of jerks and counter-jerks, of attempts that seemed illusory and which instead, kilometer after kilometre, took shape, above all substance. The group that shatters, which spreads through the streets as if they were lapilli thrown into the air from the crater.

Cycling is metamorphic, as it moves towards the finish it changes, evolves, transforms. And it transforms our expectations, it stimulates our passion, our desire to be there, on the side of the road or on the sofa, because when the race starts up, it speeds up the pace, we always end up “on the tip of the pillow”, upper body in forward, almost as if he wanted to enter the screen and stay there, with them, to push them with his gaze and cheer them on.

Above all, cycling is always karst. An accumulation of caves and underground openings, good places to accumulate extra resources that you can pull out when it seems you’ve given everything. It applies to all Sunday runners, it especially applies to runners who work their legs, hearts, lungs, soul to win a stage, a Tour de France. It always ends up that in the end the winner is whoever has the most cavities, whoever has the deepest sinkholes. Pedaling is external for movement, it is very often above all internal for the ability to draw that something more that others are unable to draw. Especially in the mountains.