It has been a long time since the French have taken the lead from foreign cyclists in their Tour de France. In recent years, a Dane and a Slovenian have been stirring the cherries, but previously they had to swallow with potatoes the victories of Spanish, British, American, Colombian, Australian cyclists, or even a gentleman from Luxembourg: Andy Schleck, maillot yellow from 2010.
Since the beginning of the century, no Frenchman has had a chance to win the Tour and, in fact, to find the last Gallic winner on the Champs Elysées we have to go back to 1985, the fifth Tour of the Breton Bernard Hinault.
Perhaps because my father had competed in the Volta a Catalunya before the war, every July we followed the Tour in El Mundo Deportivo. I was so envious of my friend Juan Ignacio, who lived in Irun and could watch the final part of the stage on French TV, that at the age of ten I asked Reis for an annual subscription to Miroir du cyclisme. My father, shocked, also subscribed to Vélo. For two years, two French magazines arrived at home every month, which I struggled to decipher, because I was studying English at school.
Half a century later, I follow the live stages whenever I can via RTVE Play. The Tour 2023 offers as a novelty fragments of the messages that the sports directors send to their riders on the radio, just like they do in basketball or Formula I. They are intended to be spontaneous messages punched live, but the truth is that they have not been heard no compromise and all are quite predictable. The only spontaneous thing is the language in which the sports directors express themselves. all The same thing that the stage winners speak in the official interview, Pello Bilbao included: English. The Dakar is no longer run in Africa and the main language used in the Tour de France is English. Oh there, there now it must be WTF.
