The Sporting Almanac Podcast · Jack Senior and Ben Davies

The Tour de France

·1 hr 27 min·5 clips

The Tour de France has a relationship with doping like no other event, where it's more likely every single winner has cheated than not.

The race turns up already heavy with legend. The cold open piles up the Tour de France as spectacle, punishment, pageant, and moral problem before the conversation settles in. This is bigger than bikes. The hosts talk jerseys, mountains, weather, support cars, cut-offs, and the strange romance of bodies pushed past sense. Then the dry grin cuts through. Alpe d'Huez, Mont Ventoux, the Col de Tourmalet, and the Champs-Élysées sit beside drawing pins, urine, mass crashes, and neutralised races. The glamour gets roughed up. Drugs and cheating trail the story for a long time, from alcohol, cocaine, and chloroform to amphetamine, EPO, growth hormone, and testosterone. Still, the episode loves a good origin story. The turn back to 1894 starts with a funny mix-up about whether doping could really go back that far. Instead, the answer is France. The host follows the Tour's birth through the Dreyfus Affair, where Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason amid anti-Semitism. The facts are nasty and specific: Devil's Island, a covered-up real spy, a show trial, a pardon, and exoneration. France splits along political lines. That split matters because Le Vélo, a leading French newspaper that mixed sports reporting with progressive politics, used sport as promotion. So cycling becomes media history as well. The great athletic institution starts, more or less, in scandal, politics, and national argument. The tone stays loose. One voice carries the research; the other interrupts, checks the route, and keeps the legend from getting polished clean.

As heard by us

A lively take on the Tour de France that keeps sport, politics, and scandal together.

The Sporting Almanac Podcast treats the Tour de France as more than a race, tracing jerseys, climbs, breakaways, and time trials into the political split that helped shape it.

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Why you'd press play

If you want the Tour de France with the politics left in, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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