By Crosby S. Noyes, Foreign Correspondent of The Star
PARlS.—After a number of years of more or less serious spectating, we have finally discovered what we consider the ideal spectator sport.
The Tour de France rates, we are given to believe, as a national sporting event in France almost in the same way as the World Series rates in the United States. But there’s one great difference between the great annual bicycle classic and most other national sports.
In the United States, after all, it’s still possible to survive socially with out memorizing the batting averages of every major league ball player over a period of the last 10 years or so. In England at Wimbledon time, you can still muddle through without the ability to discourse convincingly about the decline of European tennis or the prowess of Little Mo. Even the Spaniards are apt to be condescending to the non-bullfighting element of the community.
In France, however, the definition of a social dud is the man who, seated conversationally in a sidewalk case dries up when the talk turns to the latest in bicycle racing. Any one who doesn’t know that an equipe is a team of racers and that an etape is a lap on the 3,000-mile course is classed automatically as something of a slob. Those who falter in dissecting the virtues of Louison Bobet, incomparable two-time winner of the event; who cannot compute elapsed times to the split-second; who are dubious about which contestants walked off with what slices of the 40-million-franc purse—such unsporting types might better go into retirement until the annual furor over the Tour de France has subsided again.
The conversation, furthermore, is liable to take turns that have little to do with the relatively primitive problem of pumping bicycles up and down hills. Take, for instance, the fact that the race started this year in Amsterdam. A good patriot can work up quite a fever about this intrusion of internationalism into a fiercely national event, even though the Dutch capital paid for the privilege to the tune of $26,000. Then again, there is much conversational food in the performance of the Italians, who refused to ride in this year’s race simply because they were told that they couldn’t advertise the usual variety of alcoholic drinks, household equipment and beauty aids on their racing sweaters.
Exacting as it is from the standpoint of background preparation, the great virtue of the Tour de France is that it makes incredibly small demands on the time and patience of the enthusiast. A baseball fan at the very least must also be a television fan, a hotdog fan, a walk-a-mile-to-see-a-ballgame fan and a sit-for-hours-in-the-broiling-sun fan. Not so the amateur of the Tour de France.
About all that is required of him is that he should follow the sporting page of his newspaper with attention and be willing to defend his favored editorial opinions enthusiastically with all comers. Anything beyond this comes within the scope of purely volunteer effort and has little if anything to do with a real appreciation of the sport.
Some cynics, in fact, go so far as to claim that the Tour de France Is little more than a figment dreamed up by the newspapers (whose circulation jumps an average of 15 per cent during the race) and the advertisers who have turned the event into one of the most concentrated medicine-shows of all time. The time is not far off, comments the sports editor of Figaro, when the Tour could dispense altogether with bicycles.
Curiously enough, however, nearly three out four Frenchmen—some 30 million in all—actually perform the ceremonial ritual of “seeing the Tour de France” each year. It is, after all, a modest effort. For most it simply means piling the family into the car and driving off for a carefree interlude by the roadside. Every day the news papers carry exact times that the tour will pass through each village along the way. And within an hour one way or the other, the guesses are apt to be reasonably accurate.
Selection of a spectating vantage point is important. A grassy bank near the bottom of a hill with a hairpin turn at the bottom is recommended. Here, in addition to the attractions of the race itself, the question of whether or not various members of the caravan will make the turn is bound to stimulate the enthusiasm of the crowd to a fever-pitch in the course of the afternoon.
Here also, one can recline in relative comfort to watch the endless procession of advertising sound-trucks, radio equipped newscars, police jeeps and as sorted promotion stunts run ahead of the tour and add a certain commercial substance to the event. Whatever any one may say, there is something extraordinarily restful about lying in the sun, listening to the successive spiels for Panto hair tonic (for happy hair), Cinzano aperitif (for happy stomachs), cheeses from The Cow That Laughs, and “Le Bubble Gum Americain.”
And at the end, in a flash that hardly lasts long enough to bring every one out of his pleasant daze, the race itself sweeps by. First comes echappee —a group of sprinters vying for the day’s honors. In the main group which follows, some one spots the “maillot jaune“—the gold shirt of the leader. Although the French champion, short of breaking his neck, has the race sewed up at this point, the crowd screams encouragement. Some one shouts; “Get going, Bobet!” There follows a disconsolate group of Spanish cyclists and finally, bringing up the rear behind his own motorcycle escort, a wounded contestant, pumping along painfully toward Paris with his arm, heavily bandaged, a candidate, no doubt, for the prize awarded to “le plus malchanceux” the unluckiest racer.
As we say, it’s all over quickly and painlessly. And after that, there’s really nothing more to do except talk about the Tour de France for another whole year.
The Evening Star, Washington, DC, August 10, 1954