Joe O'Connor has been following the Tour de France this week, chasing cycling's greatest race with Great Explorations, a Vancouver-based bike tour operator. Here is his final farewell from France.
So, it's over.
Bradley Wiggins, the man with the muttonchops, sad eyes, lean body and peerless legs did it. Did what no other British man has done — won the Tour de France — and did it in style. Pulling his teammate, Mark Cavendish, across the finish for the stage win while pulling hard at the heartstrings afterwards. Growing misty-eyed as a blond-haired woman with a great big voice and a Union Jack wrapped around her waist sang God Save the Queen.
It echoed over Paris, an anthem so sweet, so strange, and so very British in a grand bastion of the French, an old city, a City of Light and romance and timeless architecture and tombs and monuments. Everything is old here, except Wiggins was something new.
He plays guitar, speaks French and can ride a bike like nobody's business, a fact made obvious in the final week of the Tour when the result became a foregone conclusion.
And for me, being in France as a rookie Tour watcher and a rider of no great talent (or any talent) was an experience like no other. As a hacker, you trundle along tree-covered roads, over mountain passes, through picture-book villages and cobblestone towns and you think: how the hell do these riders do what they do?
They are badass tough. Built like greyhounds but with the mindset of a middle linebacker, a linebacker that doesn't just play on Sundays, but every day of the week. And that realization allows you to get it. To understand just what's been going in France since the first Tour in 1903.
Henri Desgrange, the race founder, had a two-fold mission back in the days of yore. He was a newsman, after all, and part of his gig was selling papers, but the other part was knitting together a nation riven by war and upheaval and unrest into a single whole.
Making it something greater than the sum of its parts with the help of a bunch of guys riding around on hikes. Even today, with all the hoopla surrounding the event, the Tour, at its heart, remains a story about men on bikes blasting through towns, over mountains, through valleys, all the while tying the country together, all the while building momentum and waiting for that crescendo moment in Paris when the racer in the yellow jersey starts turning laps around the Champs-Elysses.
It's an epic, the Tour. It's the greatest race on Earth. You don't need a bike to understand that, but you will need a ticket to come see for yourself. Adieu Tour. You got me hooked.
• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites
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