Lunch with the FT and the Tour

One of the best columns in any of the weekend papers is Lunch with the FT. So gregarious and downright ravenous was the cyclist David 'le dandy' Millar that it made me not only hanker for him to win the yellow jersey (I had no idea at the time whether this was plausible, but with a week to go it seems unlikely) but also to take an interest in a sport I have long disparaged.**

This weekend it was the turn of bestselling author Lee Child, who couldn't have been more different. His clipped and occasionally pedantic manner, not to mention his unwillingness to eat, were unsettling. Though he had interesting things to say about the demise of the wanderer and frontiersman in British fiction ("Where would you go? Cleethorpes? Burnley?" He Laughs. "Everything is part of a conurbation.") and the ethical relationship between author, agent and publisher in a digital age ("Agents and publishers work for years at the beginning, often at a loss. You can’t cut them out. That’s not ethical.") I was left with a lingering sense of unease.

**As for the tour, I am slowly coming to terms with its complexities. All those different coloured jerseys and riders busting a gut to win one day only to be content to coast home the next. Has the sport been excessively meddled with, as is the case with Formula One? No matter, it's the sheer tenacity of the riders that is most impressive here. Much of the undeniably sadistic pleasure of watching sport whilst slumped in an armchair is derived from the anguish and pain written on the faces of those on the screen. It's all for your pleasure, after all. The Tour triumphs here. There are sports of a more gentlemanly (that's to say, leisurely) nature that infect one with a peculiar guilt. Shouldn't I be out there having a go? But marvelling at the contorted face of Niki Terpstra, the last of the breakaway riders to be swallowed up by the chasing pack, as he struggled in vain to maintain his lead, coupled with mounting tension as we neared the finish, I could no more contemplate mounting a bike and putting in a shift like that than I could a session (of any length) on the Parallel Bars.

Watching the Tour you soon come to appreciate the joys to be taken in its different stages. On a mountain ascent the utter fortitude of the riders has you transfixed. The sprint stages are about the home stretch, of course, and are all the more climatic as each team seeks to ensure that their man is best placed as the end nears. Waiting for that final sprint to start, with the teams jockeying for position, was as tense as watching a striker bear down on goal in the last minute of extra time, one wrong move and it was all for nothing.

An interesting article about the Tour from the LRB blog.