July 7, 2005 – Writers thrive on character, suspense and climax, and yet as I sit down to write about the Tour this year after a handful of days away from my keyboard Lance Armstrong is already in yellow. I’m reminded of when I used to broadcast the Tour with a colleague who continues to do so in French. For five years, I would arrive at the studio after a week or so of racing and find him slouched at his desk, despondent. He’d hand me the results of the first time trial. Miguel Indurain’s name would be at the top of the list. “The Tour is over,” he’d say. “Damn. Damn…”

And he was right: the Tour would be over, and it would just be a matter of playing out the string, tallying up the final margin. And yet he was also wrong: the Tour is more than the final standings, more than just the yellow jersey. The Tour is hundreds of small victories. For some, stages and jerseys. For others, camera time, completed mountain stages, finishing ahead of the last group — even the non-negligible victory of a spot in the lineup, as Chris Horner’s odyssey in the weeks leading up to the Tour showed. Hundreds of small victories, and thousands of tiny defeats.

But my partner was a fan, beyond the point of rationalization, and while I tried my best to put on a brave face I couldn’t help but feel the sense of loss as well, a sense that grew with the years. Something in racing had disappeared, is still gone, and will require more than the retirement of one superstar to recover.

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I got into following Formula 1 racing when I was young, getting up at odd times to watch the races, reading the magazines, reveling in the personalities, the names of the tracks, the teams”¦ the foreignness of it all. The names! Aryton Senna, Elio de Angelis, Keke Rosberg”¦ And the suspense! The trade-off in those days was speed versus reliability, and the result was that at any given race maybe ten racers had a card to play in the final win. In 1985, the fifteen grand prix were split between 8 winners, with the win often decided in the last handful of laps. Each race brought a new palpable sense of venturing into the unknown. That eventually eroded: the technology became such that the fastest car was also the most reliable, and the loss of the speed/reliability trade-off saw the races become increasingly predictable.

Those were also the years that I began to follow cycling a little more seriously — or as seriously as one could given our limited means of staying informed back then. The ABC Tour de France shows on the weekend. Buying l’Equipe at the import magazine shop in downtown Montreal. And my interest in cycling mirrored that of Formula 1, the foreignness, the suspense, and of course the basic trade-off (speed on the flat versus ability in the mountains) that was the essential component of strategy back then. It was a trade-off that gave each stage, each individual attack, tremendous suspense.

I am not naïve: of course there was doping back then. Rampant doping. And yet, the doping did not alter that basic trade-off, and the suspense it created. It was the bad old days of doping: steroids only enhanced whatever qualities a rider had, and the other garbage mainly increased their ability to tolerate the pain they’d inflict on themselves. Neither one changed the basic rules of the game, and neither one would give a rider qualities he didn’t have going in. There was still the suspense, the blissful suspense that one attack, one false move, one well-timed acceleration or bad decision could change the face of the Tour.

As in Formula 1, science has done a lot to erase that sense of the unknown, that suspense, in cycling. Miguel Indurain was the first culprit, showing that the same qualities that made you the best time trialist could also make you the best climber if you ignored most of what was going on, focused on your heart rate monitor, and treated the entire exercise as one long time trial. No more worrying about whether to follow an attack, whether doing so might make you bonk, whether not doing so might lose you the Tour. In Indurain’s tours, even teammates were relatively superfluous. Whereas a previous generation of Tour winners had pulled off wins in the mountains with the panache of artists, Indurain did so with all the flair of an actuary.

But one rider was not enough to change the sport: Indurain types had existed before. The true change came when it became clear that not only were Indurain’s wins dominating, but his technique was relatively easy to duplicate, given the application of enough science. The new techniques enabled a rider to fundamentally change, from a lifelong domestique to a surprisingly dominating Tour winner, or from a beefy classics type to a Tour threat.

In Formula One today, the fastest car always wins, and the nine races run so far this year have been shared between two drivers. In the Tour too, the fastest car will win. This is what Greg LeMond means when he talks about how cycling has become “more medical.” It’s not sour grapes, and he’s not alone to mourn what the sport used to be.

In 2000, as documented in the book “High-Performance Cycling” by Asker Jurkendrup, French researchers developed a new urine test for rHuEPO, basically to differentiate between articifically-administered EPO and the kind that is naturally produced in the body. Following up on a UCI rule that allows researchers to preserve samples for later testing, the researchers ran their new test on 102 preserved urine samples from the 1998 Tour — the famous Festina Tour, where doping products were found in the team car. The results: of the samples, 14 had higher than usual concentrations of EPO, and produced a test pattern consistent with artificial EPO use. Interestingly, all the remaining samples — every last one of them — had a lower than usual concentration of EPO, a phenomenon consistent with long-term use of artificial EPO but recent withdrawal. The article’s ominous conclusion: every sample showed ample evidence of illegal substance use.

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So I will watch the Tour, because I love cycling, because it is the highest level, and also out of a sense of duty. But what I once watched for inspiration, I now watch for mere enjoyment, and with discernible regret in my heart.