Countdown to the Tour de France

22 days to go until the grand départ in Bilbao

The Tour de France in Paris by Simon Gill.

by Lionel Birnie

In three weeks’ time, Simon Gill and I will step ashore in the Basque Country ready for the start of the 2023 Tour de France. Once there I’ll join up with François Thomazeau and Mitch Docker for the opening phase of the race.

As many of you will already know, François is retiring and says his days of covering a complete Tour are behind him. Listening back to our 2019 Roadtrip episode he mentioned the possibility of retirement then although we didn’t really believe him. But, yes, he meant it.

Even a secret campaign by The Cycling Podcast to lobby French president Emmanuel Macron to increase the nation’s retirement age has not quite worked.

However, we are delighted that François has agreed to join us for the first six stages before we drop him off at his second home – perhaps even spiritual home – Le Viscos, in the heart of the Pyrenees.

François has been with us for every stage of the Tour de France since he joined the team in Düsseldorf in 2017, and Mitch and I will ensure he has a fitting send-off. When we wave goodbye we will make sure he knows there will always be a nest in the back of The Cycling Podcar should he ever want to hop in and make himself comfortable.

Mitch first joined The Cycling Podcast for the final week of the 2021 Tour, and returned for the opening week last year. This year, he’ll be part of the crew for the first half of the race, giving his insight into what life is like in the peloton. Mitch will overlap with his gravel buddy Ian Boswell, who he rode with at the Cape Epic earlier this year. It’ll be great to welcome them both back to The Cycling Podcast because they add so much to our coverage – not least a rider’s perspective of the race. They spot things that might slip our attention and they really know what it is like to ride a grand tour.

The final week is more or less confirmed too, and plans for the Tour de France Femmes coverage, which will be anchored by Rose Manley, are taking shape too, so stand by for more details of that in the coming weeks.

A feature of our Tour de France coverage has always been the rotating cast of guests. In 2013, our first Tour, Daniel left the race at the end of the second week to get started on a book and so we were joined by the irrepressible Tan Man (Anthony Tan), Matt Beaudin, Andy Hood, Ciro Scognamiglio, Owen Slot and Orla Chennaoui, then of Sky News, who made her first appearance on the podcast after the stage that tackled Alpe d’Huez twice.

Richard, Daniel and I were actually only together for two full Tours – 2014 and 2015 – and when Daniel began work with ITV in 2016 we called on a range of expert voices from the press room while Daniel sent in The Friebos File. Then we asked François to become a permanent member of the Tour line-up, and settled into a very comfortable groove for a few years.

Of course, it is at this time of year, when we are in the thick of the logistical organisation and episode planning, that we feel Richard’s absence even more keenly than usual. He loved the Tour de France, threw himself into the build-up and rose to the occasion when the race got underway. He’s never far from our thoughts and when we arrive in Bilbao I’ll have my Buffalo FM playlists ready for the right moment, and we will do our best to channel the spirit of the Buffalo into our coverage.

Episodes for Friends of the Podcast

To mark the 10th anniversary of The Cycling Podcast’s first episode, and begin the countdown to the Tour de France, we are re-releasing three Friends of the Podcast episodes for the first time since they were originally made.

The Roadtrip, recorded at the 2017 Tour de France, is online now. That was the year François joined as a permanent member of our Tour team as we set off from Düsseldorf.

Listening through the episodes brought back so many fond memories. In the 2017 Roadtrip two-parter we made a surreal return visit to Lure, endured a rubbery encounter with andouillette and François invented a new drink, Teappuccino. Then it was off to the Col d’Izoard with Orla Chennaoui to see La Course, we met Caley Fretz and Ciro Scognamiglio on the mountain and learned about the sex shop time trial. Don’t worry, it’s not as sleazy as it sounds. Then, after three weeks in his nest in the back of the car, we delivered François to his home town, Marseille.

On Monday, we’ll release In the Team Car, recorded during the 17th stage of the 2017 race from La Mure to Serre Chevalier. Richard took his place in the passenger seat of Cannondale-Drapac’s race car two, alongside sports director Ken Vanmarcke. Nerves were jangling in the team because Rigoberto Uran was lying fourth overall with a great chance of climbing up into the podium positions.

That episode is one of the best we’ve ever made – it makes you feel like you’re in the passenger seat, or perhaps nestled in the back between the mechanic and his wheels, and gives a glorious, immersive insight into the controlled chaos of the fleet of team cars that follow and support the riders. If you’ve ever wondered what all the team cars do and why they are there, this will give your answer.

Then, on Monday, June 19, we’ll add the 2019 Roadtrip, telling the story of our journey from Brussels to Paris. Finally, on June 23, we’ll have a new episode to mark the 10th anniversary of the very first episode of The Cycling Podcast – which was called then The Humans Invent Cycling Podcast.

The Science In Sport Tour de Lunsar

Tour de Lunsar 2023 by Oskar Scarsbrook

The latest episode of Service Course is called Lunsar to Arkansas, and it features a compelling, atmospheric documentary piece about the Tour de Lunsar, which was held in Sierra Leone at the end of April. It’s a grassroots event held around Freetown and it highlights the challenges athletes face just to get on a bike and race in that part of West Africa.

A few years ago, Science In Sport chief executive Stephen Moon came across the event on social media and decided he wanted to do something to help support the organisers and athletes. He first contacted Tennessee Dixon, who wanted help getting bikes, equipment and kit into the country. Stephen offered to help, at first on a personal level, and after overcoming considerable logistical hurdles such is the difficult of getting goods into Sierra Leone without them going missing, this led to a building a relationship with the race and with Karim Kamara, aka Stylish, of the Lunsar Cycling Team. Science In Sport is now the title sponsor of the race, which has events for junior and women riders as well as a four-day stage race. This year a team came from Nigeria to take part.

As Stephen says: ‘They were pretty dominant but that’s not the point really, it’s the fact that a team would come from Nigeria that’s a big plus. In the same way that Rwanda has become a centre for cycling in the eastern region, if Sierra Leone can become the focus in the west maybe we can get more help from the UCI. But the guys did it themselves and that is to their credit.

‘It’s grassroots. It’s put on by nine clubs from around Sierra Leone. They’ve said, “Look, if we’re not going to have something organised [for us] we’ll organise something ourselves.”’

He explained Science In Sport’s decision to sponsor the race. ‘Our whole model is that our consumers look up at people who use Science In Sport and there’s a trickle-down effect. Now, it would be remiss of us to ignore all the people in the pyramid. We’re very good at fuelling the people charging around the Surrey Hills and people doing Gran Fondos and whatever, but cycling is a global community and there are all manner of riders. Now, is there any financial return from helping the guys out in Sierra Leone? No. But they are part of the cycling community and the minute you start excluding parts of the cycling community you’ve sort of lost your soul somewhere along the way haven’t you.

‘There’s no hard-nosed business answer but there’s a moral answer. It’s not some kind of worthy thing, it’s a recognition that cycling is a global sport and that we’re a global sisterhood and brotherhood.’

Through the race, Tom checked in with Oskar Scarsbrook, who was working on the race and Oskar spoke to some of the key people involved in the Tour de Lunsar and it’s a fantastic listen.

Kilometre 0 archive

Did you know that Friends of the Podcast subscribers can listen to the full archive of Kilometre 0 episodes from 2015 to 2019?

We started Kilometre 0 in 2015 as a weekday morning show to accompany our stage recaps that are released in the evening. The idea was to create a series of magazine-style features in audio to tell stories we wouldn’t have time for in the main show. The first episode was recorded in the car as Richard, Daniel and I travelled to Utrecht.

In 2015, we wandered around the Tour’s Village Départ, we looked at the role of the domestiques, the mechanics and the sponsors, I spoke to a couple of team chefs (of course, I did), took a looked around the team buses, and spent a day on the cobbles. Unlike the previous year, no Adidas Gazelles were damaged in the making of that episode. Richard spent a day with the fans on the Col de Manse, Daniel took a day off the race to see the circus that had gathered around the controversial Lance Armstrong’s return to France, and we met the voice of Radio Tour, Seb Piquet, Kathy LeMond and the boss of the Tour, Christian Prudhomme.

Kilometre 0 has always been fun to make because more or less anything goes. It’s a chance to tell some old or forgotten stories, meet interesting people or just have a blast. One of my favourite memories was a Juke Box Jury-style episode we made with François, where we listened to some Tour de France-themed music. That ended up being an episode called Tour de la Musique, which was part of the 2017 series.

My other highlights included Breaking the Story, in which François talked about how he broke the news of the Festina drugs bust while he was working for the Reuters news agency, David Walsh’s memories of Lance Armstrong’s first Tour win in 1999, and 1984, featuring the American Marianne Martin, who won the first Tour Féminin.

There are currently 112 Tour de France-themed episodes of Kilometre 0, recorded between 2015 and 2019, on the Friends of the Podcast feed, plus our old Giro and Vuelta episodes. The 2020-2022 episodes are still on the regular feed but will move across in the off-season.

Kilometre 0 at the 2023 Tour de France will be available exclusively for Friends of the Podcast subscribers.

The Mowtown Maestro’s Substack

Larry Warbasse headed from the Giro d’Italia, where he finished 44th in the general classification for AG2R-Citroën / The Cycling Podcast to the Flint Hills of Kansas to ride Unbound, one of the biggest – if not the biggest – gravel races in the world. He wrote about his experience in This is Gravel on his own Substack and it was a great read… ‘It was brilliant,’ François Thomazeau.

Larry finished 19th in the elite men’s race and Ian Boswell was fifth.

This is Gravel