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If you followed the Tour de France this year,
you were in for a surreal experience. Not because it was one of the most open
and exciting battles for the yellow jersey of the past decades. But because of
the extreme weather conditions that burst onto the stage but were considered
mere bit players.
This year’s edition reminded us that the Tour
can be a great bike race. For once, the race wasn’t
paralyzed by a star-studded Sky train (now Ineos). Instead, stellar
performances by French riders Julian Alaphilippe and Thibaut Pinot showed the
world that France not only provides breathtaking backdrops to a globalized
sport, but that it has great bike riders, too, who came darn close to bringing
the yellow jersey ‘home.’ Another Frenchman, Romain Bardet, took the polka dot
jersey for best climber. And so this year’s edition may go down as the one that
gave the Tour back to the people of France. It will be forgotten that it was
also the one that showed that a new climate regime is taking it away from them.
The first two weeks of the Tour were perfect.
Clement conditions, exciting stages from day 1, a Frenchman,Julian Alaphilippe,
in yellow, and another French darling, Thibaut Pinot, winning on top of the
Tourmalet.
The Tour’s final week, however, started off in
an intense heat wave. On the day of stage 16, a flat stage with start and
finish in Nîmes, Meteo France had placed 80 départements under “code orange” for
heat wave (for Nîmes, it was “code yellow”). Cities in the West set new
all-time temperature records (41.2℃ in Bordeaux).
The stage was won by Australien Caleb Ewan.
Afterward, he said that he had “felt so bad today during the
day. I think the heat really got to me.” But he won anyway.
Interviewed before the stage, rival sprinter
Dylan Groenwegen boasted that it was a matter of mindset. “Just
pedal, stop whining,” he said. The Tour de France organization basically
mirrored that position, dismissing a call to action over the heat by green jersey
wearer Peter Sagan. After the stage, Groenewegen’s teammate and GC contender
Steven Kruijswijk took a different stance: “Today it was code
yellow or code orange everywhere,” Kruijswijk said, “but apparently that is not
the case in the Tour de France. (...) You can see that measures are taken
everywhere in extreme heat, but we just keep going.”
And going they kept. The next day, the highest
alert - “code red” - was issued for 20 départements in the North; in the
South, the Tour peloton attacked 200 blazingly hot kilometers from Pont du Gard
to Gap. Heading into the Alps, some altitude kept things manageable. Riders
adapted by taking in enormous amounts of liquids and wearing ice-vests before
and after the stage, but the heat took away the peloton's apetite for racing.
Thursday July 25th, three days before the
Tour’s arrival, Paris was frying in 42,6℃. The Tour peloton
crossed the high Alps. 2000+ m altitude and the first thunderstorms brought
some relief. The next day, the race had to be cut short because a heat-fueled
hail storm had dumped its excess energy on the road to Tignes, covering it in hail and mud. The caravan
lauded the decision by the race organizers in the face of such “exceptional”
circumstances. Force majeure. Is it, in July 2019? The next day, the stage had
to be cut in half because similar storms had wreaked havoc on the mountain roads near
Cormet de Roselend. In two days, the Tour parcours, a year in the making,
changed face drastically.
But at the celebrations in Paris, just one day
later, everything seemed...so normal: just another Tour had come to a close.
When the Tour de France peloton rolled through
the Louvre museum onto the Champs
Elysées in the warm evening light - a breathtaking sight - the
crushing heat and hail only seemed memories from a distant past, the
still-raging Siberian wildfires otherworldly. That’s what’s
surreal: the Tour-as-usual.
A day after the Tour, a symbolic video emerged. It contained images from a
junior team time trial race in Catalunya. It showed a team and its follow car
ride full speed into a flooded street. The water hit the riders and their bikes
to the ground and their sports directors jumped out of the car into the water,
arms raised in exasperation. As the riders struggle to emerge from the water, a
director is heard saying “Stay calm, let’s go! Put on your helmet, you have to
finish!” The show had to go on, even after it smacked its face.
If sports are a metaphor for life, that is
certainly true for the dominant approach to the climate breakdown we have
knowingly rushed into and which can now be seen all around the globe all the
time. The approach is to look away, deal with the weather but de facto deny dependence on a hospitable
state of the biosphere. Not just cycling. Just think of the next men’s soccer
world cup in 2022, which the FIFA managed to assign to Qatar where summer daytime temperatures reach 42℃ on
average. It was later forced to move the tournament to November and December,
messing up many national leagues.
On the day the Tour peloton braved the heat
around Nîmes, Greta Thunberg, the swedish teenager who inspired the school
strikes for the climate around the globe, held her
speech at France’s General Assembly. Critics say that it is
ridiculous to listen to school children - what do they know? But what’s most
ridiculous is that she’s right. That, like the Tour de France, most
institutions do not act like they believe what is observed twenty-four-seven.
Thunberg put it well: “They are more scared of me and
by the youth climate protests than by the real problem.” The pitiful ad-hominems coming her way only help prove her
point.
A report by World Weather Attribution concluded
that although the July heat wave that struck much of Europe was exceptional, it
would have been 1.5 to 3℃ less hot without man-made warming. In addition,
climate change has already made such a heat wave 10 times more likely, a trend
that is sure to continue. Moreover, heat waves tend to followed by
thunderstorms, which are getting more violent as warmer air can
hold more water. The 2019 Tour encountered both these phenomena while being
even lucky to escape the worst heat.
If the Tour - and other sports - wants to keep
inspiring, keep us dreaming, and keep doing its nation proud, it cannot shrug
off this year’s extreme weather as did Tour director Thierry Gouvenou (“Oh no worries, it’s once every 30 years…”). It
needs a vision for the new climate regime, for what a Tour de France in 2050
can look like, how it can remain the perfect distraction in July that it is. To
do so as a sport so tied to climate, nature, land, it cannot ignore they’re
changing. It needs to get real to let the athletes keep making the show, not
the circumstances.
