The wait is over, the Tour de France begins

July is always quite complicated. Or at least it’s complicated to explain, especially to those who don’t suffer from the need to pedal or see people pedalling, why they prefer the heat of a house with a TV on to everything else, including the sea. Ice cold beer gives us the refreshment of water, fantasy will take care of the rest. It’s always been pretty hard to explain all of this. Even more so this year, now, in these (and coming) days. The three weeks and pennies that determine this lack of communication begin today, Saturday 1 July, and will end on Sunday 23. Three weeks that are twenty-one stages, 3,404 kilometres, 56,609 meters in altitude, which the Tour de France 2023. And it’s been years, maybe decades since a Tour hasn’t been expected with such passion and curiosity. Maybe since 1998, to see what Marco Pantani would do after his victory in the Giro d’Italia; maybe since 2000 to see if Lance Armstrong would repeat himself and what would the Pirate know what you do. But he was always involved, Pantani. Pantani is gone, and the wait does not concern the affection for the flag next to the name and surname of a runner. There are seven Italians, few – only in 1983 there were fewer, six – but goodalmost impossible that one can pick up where Vincenzo Nibali left off in 2014.

The expectation for this Tour de France is quite different. Much more complex, therefore simpler, than a limiting national sporting pride. It’s waiting for the beautiful. And the beauty has nothing to do with the flags of the states (although some are particularly beautiful, but here we enter the fetish) that appear next to the names and surnames that fill the orders of arrival. It has to do with the taste you feel when you go fast on the pedals. It has to do with what was a year ago, which was repeated in the spring and anytime, anywhere when Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard, Wout van Aert, Mathieu van der Poel, Tom Pidcock, Julian Alaphilippe – or at least nurtured subsets containing these riders – cross their cycling trajectories.

Everyone will be there at the Grande Boucle 2023, the 110th edition. And they won’t be alone, there are other people who can make their hearts beat at least ten beats faster. The hope, not too hidden, is that this year’s Tour can be at least (almost) as spectacular as last year’s and who knows maybe better, just to make us delude ourselves – it’s a complicated moment we need illusions – that cycling now both the one seen at the 2022 Tour and at Flanders and at Amstel and at this year’s Roubaix, a cycling where you look for the slaughter regardless of the risk of being able to jump.

Races that will remain in the memory for a long time, which have had the merit of creating expectation, illusion, give vent to the ability to invent and the possibility of hoping that this sport has become, is becoming, a long succession of moments of excitement. But that’s not the case. Not always at least. These rides are still an exception. And luckily. Luckily because it would be a bad awakening to rediscover that not all runners have the stamina, strength, ability to suffer and find a healthy and conscious lust in doing so. The Giro made us understand that. It wasn’t a bad Giro, the problem is that the rest is better and it’s better when these are here.

And these meet again in France, at the Tour de France, which is still a traveling national holiday, but which makes the countries it crosses celebrate in the days before and after. Maybe the context doesn’t count for anything, certainly the runners who are damned to break away and chase each other almost don’t know it. Against another thing for them: prestige and prize money. The Tour is unbeatable in both fields. Above all, he is unbeatable for having created all of this while maintaining, at least a little, the ability to make everyone feel part of something big, grandiose, a wonderful madness that repeats itself every year. It was like this in 1903, it is like this in some ways still, despite everything having changed, despite the fact that the Tour is one of the largest and most logistically refined caravans in the world.

The Tour de France has long been a recurring story. It changed little, it knew it was the oldest stage race in cycling, it made this weigh. Now he’s having fun, he’s giving vent to his imagination, he enjoys creating refined and complicated warps in which to arrange bizarre, unpredictable wefts.

This year he has set up a route that seems to be for the purest climbers: eight mountain stages, four uphill finishes, all five French mountain ranges (in order of appearance in the race: Pyrenees, Massif Central, Massif du Jura, Alps and Vosges), only to then realize that there are three big climbs, those from about twenty kilometres, great heights and an hour’s ascent: Col du Tourmalet, Gran Colombier and Col de la Loze. And then one wonders if it is not yet another coup de théâtre that the Tour wants to give us, the intrinsic ability to make believe one thing and then place another in the world, so as to leave us once again speechless telling us : This wasn’t how I thought it would go.