Is cycling the world's worst spectator sport?

Summer is upon us, and the Tour de France has pedalled once again on to the horizon. 

But I’m not a cyclist. Thus, as every year, I shall spend the next week or two trying to generate an interest in bicycles. And, as every year, I shall stumble against a basic question: “Why would anyone ever get on a bike – when there are cars for the countryside, buses and trams for towns, and feet for everywhere? Feet, which don’t get punctured, pitch you into a ditch if you stop too sharply, or need carrying home when a chain snaps?”

I’m aware that I’m in a minority. Literally trillions of people cycle. Men and women I know and admire in Britain regularly quarter the Trough of Bowland in very tight outfits and wraparound shades. This makes them easy to spot in Dunsop Bridge. In France, friends take their Lycra up and down the Cévennes hills. And the French ones, at least, all salivate at the prospect of the Tour de France. Many pack tents into motor-vans to go and stake out distant mountainsides, for a better view.

Yet, as far as I can tell, the Tour is the planet’s second-least-engrossing sporting spectacle (the first being sumo wrestling). I’ve seen it a couple of times, notably when the peloton came past the end of our country lane. We were early in attendance, numerous and excited. After a very long time, the vanguard commercial caravan steamed past in a cacophony of raw PR and world-beating tat. Perfectly sensible villagers were seized by frenzy as, from speeding vans shaped liked salami, young women chucked sun visors and miniatures of Tintin made of goat’s-milk cheese. Then they were gone.

Excitement crept up a notch. The riders were coming! There they were! Schwooompf! They had gone, too – 47 seconds in all, give or take. We had waited all morning. Children had been building up to this for days – and the whole damned thing was over in 47 seconds. What we’d witnessed was a blur – which I can witness any time I want, just by shaking my head violently from side to side, and without leaving home.

Like so much of life, the Tour is marginally better on television. Cameras tracking riders up the Iseran or Tourmalet passes indicate the extraterrestrial levels of fitness required – and apparently attained these days on nothing more lethal than Lucozade. (The only way I’d ever manage it would be to swap blood with a shire horse.)

Shots of the peloton crossing the landscape may also captivate, but only fleetingly. The thing is that no one is trying to score a goal, a try or even a run; they’re just pedalling. So attention fast diverts to the landscape itself – and this is where the Tour scores big: taking viewers to parts of the world only rarely visited by travelling man (e.g. the end of our lane). French TV invariably digs out a mayor, a local dish – usually tripe-based – and a local personality who has just completed a scale model of the Pyrenees using only bottle-tops.

So much for watching cycling. In relatively recent times I have been getting out and about, on the grounds that, like cricket, cycling might be more interesting to do than to view. I started off by climbing Provence’s Mont Ventoux in 35 minutes. This would have been a 30-minute advance on the world record – had I been on a bike. But I drove. I was, though, studying cyclists I overtook all the way up, for signs of tactics and pleasure. The key tactic seemed to be to pedal, wobble, stop, throw up, get back on and repeat.

Pleasure-wise, these people appeared to be having the worst times of their lives. “Ah, but the achievement of getting to the top,” a friend argued, mysteriously: I was at the top, too, and in the finest possible fettle, while cyclists died all around me. Nor was the memorial to Tommy Simpson – the British cyclist who died on the ascent in 1967 – near the summit terribly ambiguous.

But I don’t give up easily, so I lit out for the Loire Valley and its cycle route, the Loire-à-Vélo. This runs for 500 miles, from Nevers to the estuary – and I was going to cycle. Obviously not the whole length; that would have smacked of extremism. But I was to do quite enough, from Angers to Tours. I learnt several cycling things.

First, the cycle route is not as flat as billed. On occasion, it leaves the river to charge off scaling hills – so that one arrives in, say, Fontévraud in a state of physical distress not dissimilar to that of Richard the Lionheart in Fontévraud Abbey, and he’s been dead 800 years. Second, pedalling quite long stretches of the levee is monotonous. There’s not enough variety for those of the Bruce Forsyth generation.

Third, fellow cyclists seem far more fascinated by the technicalities of cycling, and the ceremonial of kitting out, than by visiting sites. And those reinforced crotches truly do look ghastly. Fourth, I wish to hear no more about chafing. And, fifth, while you see much while cycling – especially now we’re in tourist rather than killer-athlete mode – you also miss a great deal. A side-trip to an appealing château which, in a car, would take minutes needs more serious consideration when it’s your thighs driving you there. My conclusion? A cycling holiday is OK if you’re primarily interested in cycling. If you’re using a bike as a means of transport to do other stuff, ditch it and get a car.

So the campaign to generate interest in cycling wasn’t working so well... until I returned to the Ventoux area, ignored the Mont and went around its base to the Provençal village of Villes-sur-Auzon. Here, the wine cooperative – Terraventoux – has understood everything about wine tourism. They’ve devised all sorts of wheezes to get you out into the vines, including by Solex. These are the black, buttock-rattling mopeds formerly favoured by fat farmers and nuns, but these days they run on batteries. A morning’s jaunt is a blast. It involves some pedalling, thus qualifying as “cycling” for all but purblind purists, but then whisks you through vineyards and villages at speeds of up to 22mph. At several chosen spots along the way, co-op staff pop out with wine and nibbles, before laying on a picnic at midday.

And all this, four hours and more, for little more than £30 a head. If you’re in the region, don’t hesitate. If it reconciled me to cycling it’s sure to work for you.