“I'm the cycling equivilent of the reserve goalkeeper for Plymouth Argyle”

The Tour de France is still the only race that counts for ‘them’

- Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week

Alex Dowsett once told me that one of the reasons he was grateful to finish the Tour de France in 2019 was that if someone - a taxi driver, say - heard that he was a pro cyclist and responded by asking him if he'd ridden the Tour, he could say, “Yes”.

Alex rode in 2015 as well, but crashed out on Stage 12. He reckoned you needed to finish to claim membership of the “Giant of the Road” club of Tour riders.

When I am asked if I've ridden the Tour I obviously have to say “no”. I usually try to soften the impact on their opinion of me by telling them some of the other things I've done and won. It never helps. No one believes there are enough bike riders in the world for there to be any half-decent ones left over after the Tour is full. If you haven't done the Tour, you're like a tennis player who's never played Wimbledon.

Like Wimbledon, the Tour sits in the Venn diagram overlap of “us” the cyclists (or tennis players), and “them” everyone else. We know what it is, how it represents the pinnacle of a huge sport. Everyone else thinks it's somewhere between the London Marathon and a gap year in Thailand.

I once had a literary agent whose website claimed I'd done the Tour, simply because it never occurred to them I might not have done. When the Tour started in Yorkshire in 2014, the local organisers got numerous “entries” from locals who fancied a go, or who wanted their grandkids to get a ride.