Cyclogeography by Jon Day

don’t care. We are conscious only of the wind cracking around our ears, the pain in our legs, the rhythms of pedal stroke and the twitches from the handlebars as our wheels skip across the potholes in the tarmac beneath us.
     
    ‘The dynamics of the Tour knows only four movements,’ wrote Roland Barthes in his essay on the dynamics of bicycle racing, ‘The Tour de France as Epic’, ‘to lead, to follow, to escape, to collapse’:
    To lead is the most difficult action, but also the most useless; to lead is always to sacrifice oneself; it is pure heroism, destined to parade character much more than assure results. To follow , on the contrary, is always a little cowardly, a little treacherous […] To escape is a poetic episode meant to illustrate voluntary solitude.
    A bicycle race is a communal endeavour, and it is almost impossible to win one on your own. This means that the moves you can make within a race are often purely symbolic. You can only attack with the tacit support of the group; only win if you’re allowed to by the rest of the bunch. Marked men can’t often break free on their own. A move made without support is a futile form of expression, a mute articulation of some kind rather than a genuine attempt to win.
    It is a sport that has always rewarded, indeed depended on, symbolism. The peloton has its heroes and villains. Moves are made and clawed back. Domestiques , riders whose only role is to support the leaders of their team, sacrifice themselves heroically for their stars or treacherously go for glory on their own. Riders break and keep the lead only to be drawn inevitably back in to the bunch. The mock-heroic tone of much cycling writing reflects the sport’s origins as a fundamentally literary event. From its inception, the Tour in particular was conceived of as an epic, and written about in an appropriately high style.
    The bicycle race was often interpreted as a stagefor political symbolism also. The Tour was created in the wake of the Dreyfus affair by a young journalist named Géo Lefèvre, whose editor Henri Desgrange had asked him to come up with a way of boosting his paper’s ailing sales. Before the advent of radio and television the results of the race were consumed like war: in print over breakfast, as lists of losses and gains. The yellow jersey worn by the leader of the Tour is the same colour as the pages of L’Auto , the newspaper which first organised the race.
    Quickly appropriating Lefèvre’s idea for a race that would take its riders around the whole of France, Desgrange’s aim was to create ‘the most courageous champions since antiquity’, and the heroic era of cycling involved some of the most gruelling routes the organisers could dream up.
    No one really knew what was going on out on the road during those early races. Cheating was rife. Riders took trains and had friends pick them up in cars along the route. One rider was once was caught being towed along the road by a car on a length of wire, the other end attached to a cork clamped between his teeth. During the first incarnation of the race Lefèvre was described by his son standing at night ‘on the edge of the road, a storm lantern in his hand, searching in the shadows for riders who surged out of the dark from time to time, yelled their name and disappeared into the distance.’
    Early cycling journalists were notorious for inventing facts, changing the positions of riders andfabricating knowledge of entire stages. On an early Tour the journalist Orio Vergani invented accounts of entire stages of races he hadn’t seen. Later he reported that he had written about the race ‘in the only way I could, that is, with my imagination’. In the early years the stories told about the Tour was much more important than the reality. Perhaps they still are.
     
    When we hit Oxford Street the pack swerves hard right, round the front of a bus. Its passengers stare through the glass at us as we pass. We’re gone before they