I still want to write about the coming real estate bubble, especially given the rise in short-term rates in the US. Many home-equity lines of credit are not fixed the way mortgages are, so any increase in rates will raise monthly payments, eventually weakening prices in the housing market. But before addressing these extraordinary popular delusions, I wanted to touch on the madness of crowds as seen from the sidelines of the Tour de France.
For those who know nothing about the race, it takes place during three weeks in July, makes a large, but not continuous circle around France, and features about 20 teams of nine riders each. The winner (for the past seven years it has been Lance Armstrong) is the rider who completes the 21 daily stages in the lowest cumulative amount of time. Mostly the race goes from one city to another, as a giant pack. But sometimes the riders race against the clock, instead of each other, on days known in the business as time trials. To win the Tour, you have to ride well in the mountains, which few do, and ride well against the clock, when no team tactics come into play.
The companies that sponsor professional cycling teams tend to be European industrial concerns that want their billboard, in the guise of team jerseys, broadcast around the world during the month of July. Nevertheless, not all sponsors are European. Armstrong won six of his seven Tours under the flag of the U.S. Postal Service, which, so far as I can judge, has absolutely no business in Europe aside from regularly losing the Christmas packages my mother sends to our children. Sponsoring a professional cycling team costs about $6 million, and no doubt companies that take to the road divide prime time minutes into the calculated length of breakaways.
Toward the end of this year’s tour, my nine-year old son Charles and I decided to join the mayhem of a Tour stage. This one, a time trial, was unrolling in St. Etienne, a provincial city southwest of Lyon. It took three hours to get there by train from Geneva, and then we walked to the Village du Tour, near the starting line. My friend, Sam Abt, who writes excellent books about professional cycling, had arranged for us to have Village badges, which gave us proximity to the team buses, the riders, and the hospitality wagons that precede the Tour around France, littering the landscape with small product samples. On Tour, B2B commerce means throwing candy to clusters of small roadside children.
We donned our bracelets to enter the Village and said a quick hello to Sam, who was under a deadline and could only see us briefly. (Off to the Races, his compendium, is available at www.amazon.com). Thus Charles and I were left to our own devices, something we had not planned. We had neither a camera nor an autograph pen, but decided our Village time was best spent collecting signatures of the rich and famous. Before long we were in business, and had the autograph of Laurent Jalabert, who during the course of his long career was at times ranked no. 1 in the world.
Anyone watching the Tour on television or wandering around the starting line at some point asks themselves the question: Is professional bike racing a drug sport? In the last several years, but well before that, all sorts of allegations have swirled around professional cycling, and many big-name stars, including Tour winners like Marco Pantani, have been accused of or judged to have taken illegal stimulants. In the old days, riders would take pep pills or drink a concoction called an atomic bomb, which consisted of things like espresso and Coca-Cola, which propelled more than a few riders toward the finish line. Now doping involves synthetic growth hormones, which can be difficult to trace, even in modern medical tests.
Actually while Charles and I were wandering the Village, we came across a celebrated doper, Richard Virenque, who is retired now but who regularly won the Tour climber’s jersey, for being the best in the mountains. Virenque was hobnobbing at the tent of a former sponsor, Champion, a supermarket chain. Charles ducked under the cordon and asked for his autograph. Virenque was with the sponsors’ clients, shaking hands and the like. But he stopped for the small boy, autographed his book, gave him a hat, and sat him briefly at the head table, obviously chatting him up. What can I say? Yes, Virenque may have doped, and then lied about it, as the world knows. But he was a gracious champion with my son, so, for now, anyway, “Allez Richard.”
You would think sponsor companies would have some reluctance to associate themselves with a sport under the cloud of scandal. Most of the big teams, at some point, have lost riders who have tested positive. Even the gold medal winner at the Athens Olympics, the personable Tyler Hamilton, was suspended for blood packing. But anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. The watchmaker Festina, which lost nearly its entire team in a doping scandal in the late 1990s, reported sheepishly that sales had never been better than when the police were frog-marching their riders into station houses around France. I have always had my doubts about companies that try to build brand recognition on the backs of athletes, but a Tour team costs about the same as two Super Bowl commercials, and you get fame, for most of July, in good times and bad.
Yes, we tried to catch a glimpse of Lance Armstrong and his celebrity girlfriend, Sheryl Crow, the singer. There we had mixed success. We got shoved aside near the Discovery Channel team bus, and thought we were out of position until another van pulled up next to us, and let out Sheryl, Lance’s kids, and Lance’s mother, but not Lance, who remained inside, presumably resting. I have no idea if Lance has ever taken controlled substances. He has never failed a drug test, a point he and his handlers have made repeatedly when suspicions were raised. But I have to admire anybody who can win a Tour de France while traveling in a camper van that holds his mother, his singer girlfriend, and three little kids whose mother he divorced a few years ago. It looked like an out-take of “Racing with the Fockers.”
Needless to say, we did not get Sheryl’s autograph, or even her phone number, but we had a lovely brief encounter with Phil Ligett, who broadcasts the Tour to a large part of the English-speaking world. He saw Charles along a barrier, autograph book in hand, and graciously signed his name, when he just as easily could have breezed past. “Allez Phil.” In many ways, his mellifluous voice, describing the 1980s victories of Greg LeMond, are responsible for cycling’s emergence as a world-class sport, rather than something only done in Belgium in the rain.
Fresh from our Sheryl sighting, we were deciding what to do next. Watch a few riders start? Go out on the course? Then, as if produced by a conjurer, we found Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, standing in front of us. “Who does he ride for?” I whispered to Charles. I can only guess he was invited on Tour by Sheryl and Lance, although Armstrong is an Austin pal of President George W. Bush. To clarify their affiliations to the sport: Bush is a mountain biker, known on occasion to chew a little dirt, while Kerry campaigned with a Serrota, an Italian racing bike. Nevertheless, in the Village du Tour Kerry appeared as lost and overwhelmed as we were. He did not seem to have an aid or his wife in tow. Not even a nine-year old boy with a favor bag.
In person, Kerry, who is “taller than you think,” was wearing immaculate casual attire, what you would expect to find on a vacationing Yale man: khaki trousers, a checked shirt, and what looked to me like a $200 salt-and-pepper haircut. For a while Charles and I just stood there watching him. Like a nervous race horse, he would, out of nowhere, break into his senatorial stride and disappear around the Village—only to reappear several minutes later, as if he were a thoroughbred, making a second lap around the track.
On one of his trots, when he slowed to acknowledge the buzz of the crowd, Charles got his autograph. A proud father, I told the Senator that “this little boy knows Shaw McDermott,” a Boston lawyer and a friend of ours and also, for many years, of Senator Kerry. The candidate didn’t quite pick up on that conversation lateral, saying something like, “Is that right?” before moving on. Maybe I am making too much of a brief encounter at a bike race, but in that instant I could see how he lost the presidency, by his inability to respond naturally—be it to a little boy in an autograph line or to the Swift boat veterans.
Kerry did, however, connect with Eddy Merckx, the greatest cyclist in history, who was also footloose in the Village, greeting well-wishers. Merckx won five Tours, and about 500 races in his career during the 1960s and 70s. Truly, he was or is the Babe Ruth of cycling. I pointed him out to Charles, who was then swept up in a scrum of television reporters and journalists, who were no doubt eager to catch whatever electoral advice Kerry might be soliciting from The Cannibal, as he was sometimes known, given his distaste for finishing second. I had a slight moment of parental anxiety after Charles disappeared from view, but a few moments later I had the pleasure of seeing Merckx and Kerry in conversation, and then that familiar red Champion hat, and a burgeoning autograph book, bobbing by their side.
