My OperaLe Tour de France
Thursday, December 21, 2006 8:28:10 AM
I am not really a sport fan. To be frank, I hate sports sometimes yet I only hate those rude and fierce games like basketball, football, rugby and so on. But please don’t regard me as a lazy girl who always stay in front of the computer and never move my body even an inch out of the chair. I have my favourite sports games. I like playing tennis, I like jogging, I love swimming, and I like sailing and cycling. For sailing, I hope I could have my own boat one day, now I would just watch regatta for fun and joy; for cycling, now I don’t have my bicycle neither, I would just watch cycle racing for delight and pleasure. Speaking of cycle racing, Le Tour de France is my most favourite. Le Tour de France, might be the most famous and popular cycle racing in the world, besides we have The Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) and World Cycling Championship. These three are called the Triple Crown of Cycling. The other two cycling racing is not that famous and well known in the world, but Tour de France has its reputation in the globe, it has the household name of the cycling racing around the world, even unprofessional amateur of cycling like me, have known the name of it for years.
Tour de France has a long, long history. It began in 1903. At the very beginning, this competition was a stunt promotion of the sports newspaper l‘Auto (ancestor of the present l‘Équipe) of the personal brainchild of Frenchman Henri Desgrange. There was no team at that time, riders competed as individual athletes and there was not anyone to help them with food of accommodation. The riders were alone in the competition. Sometimes, riders were even required to cycle through the night. How incredible and unbelievable!
Today, the Tour de France is so well organised and play in team though there’s still one person could be the champion. Guess how many vehicles follow the rider? 1,500 of which including official vehicles, motorcycles and tour buses. And there’re 13,000 policemen and 2,300 representatives of the world media, which there’s no exact statistic of the total number.
With 103 years of history, the Tour de France is now a huge carnival of France of even of the Europe continent. Over 15 million roadside spectator and 2 billion television viewers watch the game. The Tour spills out onto the streets and embrace to the ordinary people, the most famous rider like Lance Armstrong may just rides his bike passes through the path under your balcony some day, you never know.
I always dream that if I could stand by the side of the road to cheer and to bravo. Every time I watch the show on TV, seeing the heavenly beautiful scene of the French country, it’s the time I dream for my tour for France. There’s another tricky thing of the Tour de France is that people of the world would see the intoxicating scenery of the country and most of them will have the intention to have a trip to France.
Also, the Tour de France is the very time to make people become Gallomania.
