Falling out of love with grand tours

I'm slowly falling out of love with watching grand tours

On Tuesday afternoon, four days into the Vuelta, Tadej Pogacar attacked with fifty kilometres left of a mountain stage in Andorra, rode alone over two climbs, and arrived two minutes and thirty-nine seconds before anyone else. He now leads the race by three and a half minutes. People are dusting off the record books to check when a grand tour was last led from the first day to the last, and the answer is Tony Rominger, 1994, and the way this is going he'll have company by Granada.

I watched it happen, and I want to describe the feeling honestly, because it wasn't excitement and it wasn't outrage. It was nothing. A shrug with a heart rate. The greatest rider of his generation, possibly of any generation, doing something that would have had me off the sofa five years ago, and I sat there feeling the way you feel watching someone else's exam results come in: mildly interested in the number, emotionally elsewhere.

That's when I finally admitted what this season has been whispering: I'm slowly falling out of love with watching grand tours.

Let me be precise about what I'm not saying, because this is the part that matters. I am not blaming Tadej Pogacar. You cannot blame a man for being magnificent. Parts of what he is doing have simply never been done: nobody has reached five Tour wins younger, nobody has ridden a faster Tour than this July's, and the six minutes and twenty-six seconds he put into second place is the kind of margin the sport retired decades ago, delivered while visibly declining to win more stages in the final week out of something close to politeness. He broke the Tourmalet's ascent record by over two minutes. Now he's dismantling the one grand tour missing from his shelf, seemingly between coffees. The comparisons left "generational" behind a while ago. We are somewhere in Merckx country now, and I understand the argument that says we should simply be grateful: you are watching the greatest ever in real time, in high definition, and your grandchildren will ask you about him. Appreciate it.

And I do appreciate it. That's the strange part. I appreciate it the way appreciate it the way I appreciate the Colosseum. Nobody’s on the edge of their seat at the Colosseum anymore.

Because here's the thing sport cannot survive without, the thing that separates it from performance art: not knowing. That's the entire product. The reason sport does something to us that a film can't is that nobody, not even the participants, knows the ending. Strip the uncertainty out and what remains can still be beautiful, historic, technically astonishing, but it's an exhibition, not a contest. And a three-week grand tour asks a great deal of you, twenty-one afternoons, eighty-plus hours, on the promise of a battle. When the battle is settled by the first weekend, when you genuinely know the winner after two stages, every remaining hour becomes epilogue. I felt it in July, drifting out of the room by week three. I felt it again on Tuesday, four days in, when the Vuelta quietly stopped being a question.

I know the counterargument, because people offer it every time I say this out loud: he might crash. He might get ill. Anything can happen in three weeks. And that's true. It's also, if you actually listen to it, a horrible argument. When the only remaining source of suspense in a bike race is the possibility of catastrophe, something has gone wrong with the bike race. I don't want to watch hoping the script gets torn up by an ambulance. Jeopardy that depends on disaster isn't sporting tension, it's rubbernecking with extra steps. The fun, as they say, has already left the chat, and no hypothetical crash is bringing it back in.

And before anyone points out that we've been here before, we have, sort of. They called Merckx a cannibal and complained the sport was becoming a procession. Indurain sent whole Julys to sleep. Sky turned mountains into spreadsheets. Every era of dominance has strained the love of the people watching it. But those eras had borders. Merckx had rivals who beat him. The Sky train could be attacked, even when it couldn't be broken. What's different now is the completeness: one man winning the sprints uphill, the time trials, the monuments, the worlds, the lot, with margins that belong to another century, and doing it while cheerful. There isn't a chink. There isn't even a bad week. The unknown, the load-bearing wall of the whole sport, has been removed for the foreseeable, and we're being asked to admire the architecture anyway.

Here's what makes me certain the problem is the certainty and not me falling out of love with cycling itself: three weeks ago I watched a grand tour that had me pacing the living room. It was nine days long, it came down to eight seconds, it hinged on a corner in Nice that the entire sport has now watched twenty times without agreeing on what happened, and I have thought about it every day since. The Tour de France Femmes was everything I'm describing the absence of. Nobody knew. Nobody knew until the final afternoon, and it was agony, and it was wonderful, and that's the feeling. That's the whole feeling I've been missing, and getting it from one race in the same summer that the men's racing lost it entirely is what finally made the contrast undeniable.

So no, I'm not storming off. "Slowly" is the operative word in the title. I'll still have the Vuelta on, the way you leave the radio on, and I'll still drop everything for the races where the unknown survives: the classics, the worlds, the women's calendar, any afternoon where crosswinds or cobbles or chaos give the script a chance to fight back. And I'll keep watching him, too, the way you watch a comet, because he is a fact of nature and facts of nature are worth seeing.

But love, the kind that plans its week around a stage, needs a question to hang on to. Right now the men's grand tours don't have one. He wins. Everyone knows he wins. He knows he wins, and he's charming about it, which somehow makes it worse.

Wake me up when somebody makes it a race again. I genuinely cannot wait.