The world’s most impressive sporting event - the longest, the most-watched, the most physically demanding - will pass within 10 metres of my potato patch early on Thursday afternoon.
The Tour de France is coming to my hamlet in the Norman hills (Population 6).
In France, this is like winning the lottery. It is as if a single rally of the Wimbledon tennis championships or two minutes of the football World Cup was to be played on my lawn.
The candy-coloured swarm of 180 of the fittest young men in the world will take only a couple of moments to whoosh downhill through our hamlet. No matter. We shall forever be part of the 122-year history of the Tour.
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The narrow road through the commune was resurfaced last month to remove bumps, cracks and ingrained smears of cow-manure. Our usually quiet thoroughfare has been buzzing for days with groups of cyclists and foreign cars (mostly Dutch and Belgian) exploring this year’s Tour route.
I have been writing about the Tour de France, on and off, for 47 years. I never thought that it would come down my way.
I even rode in one stage in the Tour de France in 1997. Admittedly, I was in a transport ministry truck, taking nothing more stimulating than Coca-Cola. Our arduous task that day was to drive ahead of the riders to make sure that the road was clear.
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My guide, Yannik Le Dû from the roads ministry in Paris, tried to explain to me something of the magic and mystery of the Tour to the French. “The Tour de France engraves itself in the memory of the nation from a very early age,” he said. “It’s rooted in the country itself, it is part of our identity.”
Is that still true 28 years later? When no French rider has won the Tour for 40 years?
Strangely, yes. If anything, the Tour is regaining popularity after a dip during the serial drugs scandals of the nineties and noughties. This year’s Grand Boucle (big loop) is expected to attract 15 million spectators to its 21 daily stages, roughly the same as the numbers seen in the 1980s and 1990s.
Many of those will be foreign cycling fans. The most prized places beside the steep climbs in the Alps and Pyrenees fill up with camper vans several days before the riders pass.
There is no sign yet of foreign camper vans on the Butte aux Rats (hill of rats) the roads which descends to our hamlet from the dizzy heights (362 metres or 1,187 feet) of Mont Pinçon, the highest peak in Calvados.
Locally, however, excitement has been bubbling for days. Several generations of relatives will swell the population of our hamlet from 6 to at least 20.
Unlike all other great sporting events, the Tour de France comes to you. It is free. You don’t have to book. You can stand within a few inches of the riders. It provides a day of carnival. Everyone loves carnivals. The brief rush of riders is preceded by an hour of absurdly decorated publicity cars and trucks which distribute plastic and teeth-rotting presents to the masses.
All the same, the revival of the Tour’s popularity is unexpected. Twenty years ago, many people, me included, were writing about the declining numbers of spectators on television and by the roadside.
Several reasons were offered. The French could no longer take the race seriously after generation after generation of riders had been revealed to be taking performance-enhancing drugs. Cycling, once the most popular rural sport in France, was declining as the roads grew more crowded and dangerous.
Most of all, it was said, the French were losing their sense of ownership of a race which no French rider had won since 1985.
The wait for a two-wheel French Messiah has been compared to Britain’s love-hate relationship with the Wimbledon tennis championship before Andy Murray won the men’s singles in 2013 and 2016. It is more painful than that; Wimbledon has never been part of British national identity.
Year after year, the French have got used to “their” race being won by foreigners with increasingly unpronouncable names. For the last five years, the Tour has been dominated by the Slovenian rider Tadej Pogacar and the Dane, Jonas Vingegaard. They are the favourites to win again this year.
No French rider and no French-sponsored team can now hope to win overall. They scramble instead for the secondary prizes of victory in each daily stage.
Talk of drugs in the sport has abated (whether the drugs have disappeared is another question). The new, controversial stimulant is money.
The rich foreign teams such as the United Arab Emirates team, can hire the best riders and trainers and develop the lightest and most free-moving bicycles. Speculation continues about “mechanical doping” - in other words small electric engines concealed in bikes. None has ever been found.
Surely the multiple French teams could combine to compete on equal terms with the rich foreigners. The idea is constantly discussed but always rejected. You might as well suggest merging Paris Saint Germain and Olympique Marseille.
And yet, French interest in the race has survived and even revived. The Netflix documentary series on the last three Tours (highly recommended) has been a great success and brought in new and younger fans.
The simplest explanation of the renewed interest may be the boom in urban cycling. The working class, rural sport of the 1950s and 1960s, which produced the French greats like Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor, has become an urban, middle-class pastime and necessity. We are all cyclists now.
Will the next French champion be a Parisian office worker? Doubtful.
If you are watching on TV, be sure to stay tuned at around 13.45 (French time) on Thursday when the Tour will swoop down the Hill of Rats and through the first hamlet in Culey-le-Patry. You may see me applauding close to my potato patch.
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