Tour De France

My first experience of the Tour De France was in my early teens, we were on the way back from our annual pilgrimage to the Mediterranean sea for two weeks sun, sand and warm crystal clear water. It’s amazing to me that my dad would drive us through France, Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Spain with no ability to speak anything but English. Somehow he had the confidence to walk into shops and come out with everything that we needed to survive, I guess he was fluent in Yorkshire sign language.

I was seven year old when we first started driving through Europe, for the first trip my granddad came with us. Even now I don’t understand why Ernest joined us on the trip because he’d be on the beach every day in his long-sleeved shirt and trousers, taking off his shoes and socks was his only acknowledgement to the superb weather.

My granddad had been called up for WW2 even though he was officially too old, he received his paper work towards the end of the war and was fortunate not to experience any active duty. Once basic training was over he was sent to defend Australia from the Japanese, by the time he arrived “down under” the Americans had dropped their nuclear bombs and the Japanese had surrendered. I don’t know how long my granddad spent in Australia before sailing back home but for a man who was born and lived in a small Yorkshire village all his life it must have been the trip of a life time. Then again I don’t think I’d have slept too well if I’d been on a ship knowing that we were being hunted by the fleet of devastating German U-Boats.

The HBO series Pacific has an episode or two where the heroes are stationed in Australia before they leave to attempt the nightmare task of removing the Japanese from a multitude of Pacific islands. After watching these shows I had a lot of questions that I’d liked to have asked my grandad but unfortunately he’d departed this world a long time ago. When living at home my grandmother only allowed granddad to have two bottles of stout a week at the local pub, it’s my sincere hope that his average consumption of adult beverages increased dramatically while serving his country.

One evening we were on our way back to England, my father didn’t like to drive at night and so he decided that we’d spend the night in Arras, France. These days the drive from Arras to the cross channel ferry in Calais takes about an hour but in those days it would take considerably longer. I don’t think my dad booked hotels in advance, he just drove around and when he saw something that looked decent he’d go inside and negotiate. As we were driving around the town was full of bicycles, not just the old bone shakers that are peddled around York but some kind of sleek beautiful machines with contraptions on the back wheel that I later learned were called gears. These bicycles were unlike anything I’d seen before, a kind of glimpse into the future. Outside every hotel several bicycles had been left chained together for security, my parents had no idea what was taking place and it was getting quite dark before my dad was able to secure a room for us all.

After talking to the receptionist my dad told us that the Tour De France was “in town” for the night and everywhere was booked up but using his Yorkshire charm he’d found the only room available in the city. We had no idea what the Tour De France was and found the idea of cyclists racing around France to be very strange. My dad was aware of Tommy Simpson who was an English Olympic bronze medalist and subsequent professional cyclist who became the world road race champion in 1965. Simpson was born in Haswell which is a village from “up north” and that automatically made him a hero in our family.

These days I’m a huge fan of the Tour De France, in the USA we can enjoy hours and hours of superb television coverage of the race with expert analysis. Thanks to the internet I can read all about the teams, their tactics and the riders involved. The internet has allowed so much information available and made the process of booking a hotel room very easy. Thanks to Al Gore inventing the internet my own children probably think that traveling around Europe in a car is no big deal but when my dad started doing this there wasn’t such a thing as an “autoroute” and all roads used to lead to every towns “centreville” and the “toutes directions” where we’d reach the town roundabout and be able take the exit for our next destination. My mum was the navigator, she’d have the AA route maps at her feet and she’d give my dad instructions as we drove through every town or city on the way to the sunshine coast.

My dad carried the suitcase to our room and then we set off in search of dinner. Of course all of the restaurants were busy but somewhere in the main square we found a food truck that was serving pommes frites, fries or freedom fries. These days they’d be similar to McDonalds fries but in the swinging 60’s all I’d ever known was chips from our local fish and chip shop. I remember my brother and me qualified for a Coke because we’d been on best behavior all day. There was some kind of confusion when my dad paid and I could tell that he was preoccupied as we walked back to the hotel, the exchange rate for an English pound to a French Franc involved some tricky math and since we didn’t have an abacus and pocket calculators hadn’t been invented my dad had to use his considerable brain to work out how much he’d just paid for 4 x pommes frites and 4 x cokes.

It wasn’t long before my dad concluded that we’d been ripped off, it must have been bad because he was so angry but what can you do? This incident has festered ever since then and for years while driving through Arras he’d point out where the food truck had been parked and declared that we’d be buying nothing in Arras in protest of what had happened.

Fast forward 50 years and I could imagine my dad voting for Brexit while muttering “that’s for the French food truck in Arras that ripped us off”, once a Yorkshireman is wronged it stays with him for the rest of his days. Unknown to the librarian while in England a few weeks ago I deliberately avoided going to a cafe in Windsor because the service was so bad 302 years ago, have no doubts that I showed them!

When I started this blog entry I had the intention of writing about drugs in sport but I’ll save those thoughts for another day. Meanwhile it should be noted that Tommy Simpson died in the Tour De France while ascending Mont Ventoux. Tommy's death was attributed to him mixing amphetamines and alcohol but on the official paper it was death by exhaustion. I guess he was a leader in the field of performance enhancing drugs but that wouldn’t prevent me from demanding “fisticuffs” if you have anything bad to say about a fellow northerner.

That’s my reality,

Jobsonian