Is cycling the new football?

by Tamsin Hemingray in At home on 22.07.08

It might sound like a stupid question, but is cycling better than football? I’ve been accidentally watching the Tour De France this year and, personally, I’m finding it so much more exciting than following the Premiership.

I’m a Liverpool fan, and have been ever since I was 10 and my older brother told me that Kenny Dalglish was god and that I must love him always. (There’s a whole other blog post about the grief this advice has caused me - I’m also a Brummie, and my brother converted to following The Blues shortly after igniting a love of Liverpool in my own heart, leaving me stranded in that most despised of football categories, a non-native fan.) On and off, I’ve spent the last 26 years watching the Mighty Reds win stuff and lose stuff. Sometimes I’ve laughed, sometimes I’ve cried. But in the last, what, 10 years, following a football club other than Man Utd, Arsenal and, lately, Chelsea, has been kind of predictable.

Not so “Le Tour”. First off, a Brit has been half decent in it - sprinter Mark Cavendish, who must be pretty much a dead cert for a Gold in Beijing, managed to stick it out for a gruelling 14 days of the Tour and won four stages, smashing the previous record for a British cyclist. Second, it’s the closest race in living memory, with (at the time of writing) only 55 seconds between the top four riders. But the best thing about it is the way the riders all seem to be made of some kind of bionic material. They ride and they ride and they ride over mountains on and on. And then, the next day, they get up and do it all over again. For three weeks. Sometimes (in fact, lots of the time) they crash. They do bleed - so they definitely aren’t robots - but they don’t seem to feel any pain. They just get back on their bikes and carry on riding. Compare and contrast with your average “modern slave” at a Premiership club. “Uncomplaining” is not the word that comes to mind.

But the best bit of watching this year’s Tour, for me, is the way it has rekindled my long-forgotten teen-love for Scottish cycling hero Robert Millar. No, not David Millar (this year’s “great hope” for Britain who is currently languishing in 105th place), Robert Millar. Robert came fourth in the Tour in 1984 (the highest placed finish for a Brit ever) and won the “King of the Mountains” competition that year. It was two years before Mexico ‘86 (when I fell hopelessly in love with Gary Lineker, even though he played for Everton - a passion I’ve never got over), and the sight of Robert in his red-and-white spotty top, cycling up some ridiculous mountain or another while Kraftwerk’s Tour De France played over and over in my head, remains one of my most enduring teen memories.

It was a simpler, more innocent time. I miss it. Still, at least I’ve got tonight’s ITV4 show to look forward to. And tomorrow . . . it’s Alpe D’Huez. There’s bound to be a bionic crash on that. Brilliant.

IMAGE by Flickr user J.C. Rojas