Unveiling

As I sit here it’s only hours until the official unveiling of the route for the 2007 edition of the Tour de France. And unless some sort of weird, last-minute change of heart by Christian Prudhomme, Amaury Sports Organization and whoever else determines who’s invited to the unveiling, we know one person who definitely won’t be there. Floyd Landis.

[The route has now been announced, according to this article at cyclingnews.com.]

This will make two years in a row that the winner of the Tour has been snubbed by the organizers when unveiling the coming year’s route. Of course, the previous winner, Lance Armstrong, wasn’t exactly a favorite in certain quarters, either. Perhaps they got a bit tired, and more than a bit jealous, of his winning ways. It’s been a long time since a Frenchman won the Tour. Heck, it’s been a long time since a European won the Tour.

The last Euro winner was Marco Pantani, whose career came to an early end following a failed blood test at the 1999 Giro d’Italia. Pantani, himself, came to a tragic end in 2004 when he overdosed on cocaine. The last Euro winner who is still alive is none other than Jan Ullrich, who won the Tour back in 1997. But Ullrich and Ivan Basso, formerly of Team CSC (which is run by Bjarne Riis, who won the Tour back in 1996) and a number of others were barred from riding in this year’s race after the Operation Puerto scandal broke. (Who was the last Frenchman to win the Tour? That would be Bernard Hinault who won the race in 1986. It was his 5th time on top of the podium.)

Will Ullrich, Basso or Alexander Vinokourov (who wasn’t allowed to start because so many riders from his team were barred from racing that the team could not field the minimum number of riders) be there? Not bloody likely.

Rumour has it that Oscar Pereiro may be there, which would add further to the surreal nature of the whole sordid mess that’s become the 2006 Tour. The man Prudhomme has all but declared the winner may be stepping into Floyd’s rightful place, even before a final decision or verdict has been reached about the doping allegations. Landis was and still is the real winner of the race, and he’s the one who should be at the presentation of the 2007 course.

I’d been looking forward to learning the details of the race, as I’ve got family in the UK, and what has been known prior to the unveiling of the route is that the Tour starts in London next year. I haven’t seen my relatives across the pond in 37 years, and it would make for a nice vacation, a chance to catch up with family and an opportunity to see the Tour.

The 1993 Tour went right through the town we lived in back in 1969 (which, incidentally, was the year that Eddy Merckx won his first TdF title) — Lewes, East Sussex. And it went along many of the roads we traveled on as we toured around the countryside. It would have been wonderful to get a chance to go back and have a look at the area. But back then I was too strapped for cash to even consider a trip over. These days, it could at least be in the realm of possibility.

But the way the Tour organizers are behaving towards the current holder of the yellow jersey leaves me wondering if I even want to support them in a peripheral way. This year, during the Tour, I sent in a subscription card to VeloNews because I was so excited by the race that I decided to start getting the magazine again. I let my subscription run out in about 2000, due to general boredom with the articles.

But this year’s Tour piqued my interest again, and subscribing to VeloNews sounded like a good idea at the time. Funny thing happened, though. Seems that my subscription card must’ve gotten lost, because I haven’t seen a single issue up to now, and it’s more than 3 months since I dropped that card in the mail. At this point I’m back to feeling like I’m not missing anything by not getting the mag. What I want to read I can find online for free. So why subscribe and kill the extra trees to get a print version?

The farcical nature of the whole Landis affair has me wondering whether or not I want to watch next year’s (or any future) Tour de France, let alone actually attend any of the races. But if Floyd Landis manages to overcome the hurdles in front of him, and if he manages to come back from hip surgery strong enough to race on a Pro Tour team (assuming the Pro Tour doesn’t fall to pieces), the temptation to go and root for Floyd may be too hard to resist.

What would really be fun would be standing on the Champs–Élysées while cheering Landis on to his second Tour victory. That would be a real ef-you to the naysayers out there who are all too willing to convict him of doping based on the often incomplete and shoddy reporting on this scandal that the mainstream media have served up to the masses.