Tour de France 2019: surreality of business-as-usual in the new climate regime.

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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.