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New York Times

The Trick to Watching the Tour de France? Ignore the Stars.

A highly ranked professional cyclist will compete in more than a dozen races each year, of varying lengths: solitary time trials, one-day classics, serpentine 'criterium' races through city streets. But the most storied events, the ones that inspire paeans from Ernest Hemingway and docuseries from Netflix, are the grand tours. Each is three weeks long and unspools across varied terrain. Some days the road winds through Alpine villages, past cows and sunburned spectators who look like extras in 'The Sound of Music.' Some days the path shoots skyward — those days are for the climbers. Other courses are flat, stretching across broad expanses of vines or wheat — those days are for the sprinters. There are legs fought on gravel and on cobblestones, each with their own specialists. Rarely do the riders tackle less than 100 miles in a day. I started watching the grandest of the grand tours, the Tour de France, around the time I started kindergarten, when my father was swept up in Lance Armstrong fever. I have watched it every summer since: more than two decades of races. The early years would turn out to be a bleak and unromantic time to follow cycling, as top rider after top rider, Armstrong included, tested positive for banned substances and was stripped of his titles. But as my childhood heroes fell amid excuses and apologies, I also started to notice just how little their titles or triumphs had to do with the joys of watching a grand tour. The beauty was all in the evolution of the race itself, shepherded by all the oft-forgotten teammates who maneuvered around the stars, on behalf of the stars. Deep in the scrum of the peloton or on its periphery, among the riders whose names sat at the bottom of the roster — that's where the magic happened. And yet it's the stars who are the focus of 'Tour de France: Unchained,' one of Netflix's sport documentaries-cum-psychodramas. The show, now in its third season, is obsessively interested in the talents at the front of the peloton, people like Tadej Pogacar or Jonas Vingegaard. It tracks not just their rivalries and power struggles but also their personal demons and their places in the business of cycling, much of it revealed in direct-to-camera confessionals that feel more like 'Real Housewives' cutaways than anything in the race's live stream. One major plotline revolves around mismatched resources. Pogacar's team has a slate of ritzy sponsors that includes the Emirates aviation group; we see their penthouse accommodations and their retreats in Dubai, while competitors like the longstanding French team Groupama-FDJ operate with a third or even a quarter of the budget. 'Unchained' presents these teams' managers fretting about cost-cutting or sweating profusely as they hand out roadside water bottles, complete with theme music reminiscent of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm.' The truth is that grand-tour cycling does not make for action-packed or convenient viewing. This is the formula Netflix has landed on for its competition documentaries: Skirt the event itself and get to the juicy stuff behind the scenes. The focus is on the training and the preparation, the business and the personalities, who will win and who will be mad about it. The trouble is that once you watch a few of these series — on cycling or Formula 1 racing or polo — you start to notice the beats repeating, as if the same televisual Mad Lib were just being filled in with the specific nouns, adjectives and verbs of the sport in question. There will be an underdog, a top dog, a loose cannon, a search for redemption, a David-and-Goliath struggle that pits a sovereign wealth fund against a sweaty Frenchman. This impulse to dramatize is reasonable: The truth is that grand-tour cycling does not make for action-packed or convenient viewing. Watching is an endurance sport in itself, with riders on the road for hours each day. Even Ernest Hemingway lamented how difficult it was to capture the sport's beauty: 'I have started many stories about bicycle racing,' he wrote, 'but have never written one that is as good as the races are.' Television has not done much better. It is tempted, always, to accouter every race with narrative overlays and behind-the-scenes intrigue, techno beats and psychological strife. The team at Netflix would not be the first to doubt the entertainment quotient of watching wiry men pedal for hours on end. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.