photographer Louis Canadas revisits the France of the Grande Boucle

By Benoit Hopquin

Published on June 05, 2022 at 06:00

It’s been like this every July since 1903. The Tour de France returns to our roads and its crazy cyclists take malicious pleasure in crushing our arpions on our doorsteps. Peloton whizzing by in the noise of ball bearings and derailleur gears, breakaway tumbling with the devil on their buttocks, sprinters weaving towards the finish line like a bunch of drunkards in broadside, solitary runner panting on the slope, stragglers abandoned in way like wounded soldiers, condemned to the humiliation of the broom wagon.

And then jersey colors, liveliness, which can be seen from afar. Scarlet red, bright blue, apple green, flashy orange. And yellow, of course, the most popular shade. So many images that smell of summer, popular jubilation, holidays, pastis, camping tables and, beyond that, joy.

Joy, yes. That of finding themselves huddled together in the ditches, crayfish in the full sun, screaming: “Here they are! » That of applauding the last as well as the first, thus saluting the essence of the sport, the effort. That too, a touch franchouillarde, to show itself to the whole world in its best light, in a real land of plenty. Because the France of the Tour is beautiful to delight, even if there will always be something of the Potemkin trip in this succession of postcards that national television sends to the whole world.

We miss a Tour and everything is depopulated

Time of harvests and bouquets, the month of July, therefore. Until then, only the two world wars had prevented this great circus. The bicycles had to be put away between 1915 and 1918 and hung up again between 1940 and 1946. A bicycle does not weigh much against a tank, a peloton crashes in front of an army.

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And, on a planet of fire and blood, what are emphatically called the “tragedies” of the Tour de France – punctures, falls, food cravings, bronchitis, gastroenteritis, boils or urine adulterated with doping products – cannot appear. only for what they are: figures of style, pumped up with a bicycle pump. On the shelf, the legend of cycles, dear to Antoine Blondin, or the convicts of the road, magnified by Albert Londres, when the country was on fire and bloodshed.

A war, we understand. We bow. We do with, or rather we do without, the July festival gets along. But that a microscopic virus, round as a hub, that a Covid, bib 19, comes to disturb the great barnum of the Tour, that, we would never have believed. However, in 2020, the Tour de France had to be postponed to September due to a deadly pandemic. Sanitary measure, eminently understandable, even essential. But a month of July without the Tour leaves a void. No Grande Boucle and we go around in circles.

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