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While columnists from Paris to Peoria debate the fate of Floyd Landis, awaiting the results of a second sample—the consensus is that indeed his victory in the 2006 Tour de France was aided by drugs—it's not a bad time to step back and survey the history of the event.

THE TOUR DE FRANCE: A Cultural History by Christopher Thompson Univ. of California Press 398 pp.; $29.95

In the midst of his seven-year reign as king of the Tour, Lance Armstrong published his autobiography with the cheeky title It's Not About the Bike. Of course, the book was also about his recovery from cancer, but from early success as a teenage racer to the domination of the world's most famous race, Armstrong's story cannot be told without the bike. At the time, I wondered if this book would spawn imitators:

Bill Gates: It's Not About the Computer

Mario Andretti: It's Not About the Car

Yo-Yo Ma: It's Not About the Cello

Jonah: It's Not About the Fish

Armstrong did not start a trend, but he should have loaned his title to Christopher Thompson, author of The Tour de France: A Cultural History. Thompson should have called the book It's Not About the Race. Alas, although chock-full of interesting bits about the man who founded and promoted the Tour, this book is almost completely free of information about the race itself. The cover features a splendid black & white photo of the 1947 winner of the Tour climbing a mountain with enthusiastic spectators running alongside pouring water on their hero. A reader could assume the race would appear somewhere in the text. It doesn't, except in the introduction. In the opening paragraph Thompson says he has been a fan of the Tour since he lived in Belgium as a teenager. He may have been a fan, but he was not a racer. In the first paragraph he gets the action of the race very wrong.

He writes of riders "swerving acrobatically" in the final sprint. Hardly. Sprinters hammer the straightest possible line to the finish. Swerving is not intended, but follows either elbow-banging contact at 40+ mph or one last slashing move by one rider from behind another rider. For a rider in a sprint, his vision narrowing as his heart rate reaches maximum, there is nothing but the wheel in front and the finish line. Sprinters are a scrum of fullbacks, all with the ball, trying to be first to the goal line. The final sprint looks more like the bulls at Pamplona than a group of gymnasts.

Then Thompson tells us the riders "inched up" and "rocketed down" the Alps and Pyrenees. Is he kidding? I am an amateur masters racer. I ride 10,000 miles per year training to race with other guys my age. Occasionally my training mates and I have the opportunity to ride with international professional cyclists when big races are held on the East Coast. The difference between them and us is power. That power is most evident on long, steep climbs. The pros can rocket up hills nearly twice as fast as amateurs. Lance Armstrong climbed Alpe d'Huez, the toughest of all the climbs in the Tour, at an average speed over 12 mph—that's the speed a casual tourist rider travels on level ground and is a five-minute mile for a comparison with running. On the less steep climbs, the top professionals go 17 to 20 mph uphill. Inching? Of "rocketed down" I will only say there are climbing bonus and sprint bonuses in every stage of the Tour but not one descent bonus. Nobody gains time descending. In fact in this year's Tour Floyd Landis gained one minute on his rivals in the final descent and the commentators were talking about Landis as one of the best descenders ever—and they were right. The bikes go fast downhill, but they don't accelerate. In some ways, a 55 mph descent is one of the dullest parts of a bike race. Steady speed, no effort, just coasting. The reality is the reverse of Thompson's description. Tour racers rocket up the mountains; they gain mere inches on the descents; and when they swerve it is not at all acrobatic. Thompson's words do express the view of a casual spectator, but a historian should give insight, not repeat popular misperception.

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August (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50