SNOW JOKE

After a snowless trip through the Alps and being the target of environmental protesters it's all too clear, as Chris Marshall-Bell examines, that the Tour is already being affected by the climate crisis

- Chris Marshall-Bell

In the hours before the race passed on my first ever Tour de France mountain stage in 2015, my mind was mainly fixated on the snow on the mountains in the distance, fantasising and planning ski touring lines. Mont Blanc, Europe's highest mountain which a friend and I had summited a few days prior, was visible to the north, its many glaciers that pour towards the valley floor reflecting a pristine magnificence.

With those happy times forever etched in my memory, it's been utterly heartwrenching that this year's Tour has played out against a backdrop of snowless mountains, and the hulking great glacial masses that looked so impregnable even just seven years ago are right now so very obviously vulnerable and at risk of inexistence.

Right here, right now

The climate crisis is not just a warning for tomorrow, but a real-world event that is happening right now, affecting what the Tour de France looks, feels, and smells like. "The high mountains in the background of the Galibier usually have lots of snow on them, but this time there was very little. In fact, there's been pretty much no snow at all," laments Tim De Waele, a Belgian photographer who is covering his 30th Tour. "The backgrounds and scenery have changed. Everything's different. Where there used to be snow, now there are just rocks."