The question will hang over the sport of cycling for the next couple of months. Will there be a Tour de France, or will there not?
The Tour’s economic pre-eminence in the sport has been apparent for the last half-century, and it has gradually gained greater and greater centrifugal strength, so much that it sucks the rest of cycling into its orbit.
Never has this been quite so obvious, and never has it been quite so significant: that’s because professional cycling, like the rest of the world economy, hasn’t seen anything like this since the war. Having the biggest annual sports event in the world at the centre of your sport is both a strength and a weakness. The sport has become increasingly lopsided in its economics in recent years, while remaining resolutely unequal – in an ideal world we’d be discussing the significance of the Tour de France for women’s cycling – but that’s another story.
The financial interests around the Tour are such that the pressure to run it this year will be immense. Already, opinions are pretty much polarized. Jeremy Whittle makes a convincing case for simply refusing to countenance putting the race on and the public health expert Devi Shridar speaks for many when she says it would be madness.
So can it, could it be done? Firstly, it simply won’t happen if the French authorities don’t want it to go ahead. If the perception in the French government is that it’s unsafe to run a mass event through the country as it recovers from the pandemic, au revoir Tour, and rightly so. But you can reasonably assume that as we all debate this, the organizers ASO and the UCI are exploring ways in which the race could be made safer, they will hope safe enough to satisfy the powers that be that the risks can be minimized. It’s worth exploring some of those possible measures.
The UCI’s guidance on a resumption of training for cycling recommends that athletes be tested for Covid-19 at least twice in seven days (to allow for false negatives) beforehand and it’s certain that WorldTour teams will take precautions with riders – and staff, because as well as shielding and testing riders you have to think of those in contact with them. Teams will probably create training “families” of riders and staff as they begin preparing to return to racing.
The Tour can insist that it has a detailed medical history for all the riders, and they can all be tested again immediately before the race (they undergo mandatory anti-doping tests at this point anyway). The caravan traveling with the race can be pared to the minimum – no publicity vehicles, no corporate guests, media limited to a small pool of photographers and TV staff, a very tight number of team personnel and so on. It will mean a lot of media and television won’t have immediate access to the race, but offered the option of press conferences via video or no race at all, they will accept it, if grudgingly.
A seriously restricted caravan, based on the minimum necessary to run the race, means that social interactions outside the bubble can be limited and the health of those given access will be easier to monitor with – at a minimum – pre-race testing, and daily temperature checks. Because of terrorism fears, the Tour has operated in its own increasingly tight security zone in the last few years, with bag checks and close attention to access to race areas. A seriously pared down caravan might mean that, for example, teams don’t have to share hotels, and that race hotels can be declared part of the Tour’s security zone with access denied to public and interactions with staff limited.
Even so, protocols will have to be put in place for the event that a member of the race caravan is found to have the virus. It’s hard to envisage the race going on in this circumstance – but in that event would the winner simply be declared at the point the race ended, or would it be declared null and void? Similarly, what happens if a cluster of infection is found in a stage town or area once the race has got under way?
As for the race itself, the “lockdown” Paris-Nice showed some of the way ahead: limitations on the public in start and finish areas and so on. The Tour has a huge security presence as it travels around France, so it’s possible to reduce, if not entirely close off, access to the route – each road that intersects the route has a gendarme on it anyway. Major climbs are closed before the race arrives in any case, so close them earlier. Yes, the Tour and its television viewers want to see huge crowds – the towns that pay for the race want to make money out of those crowds as well – but again, the choice may be stark: a very different looking Tour or a simulated Tour on a computer screen. And that’s just one of many stark choices that lie ahead as the sport looks to reboot itself.