TIPPING POINT:How a nation as devoted to la belle vie as the French took cycling so much to their hearts is a mystery, writes BRIAN O'CONNOR

THE TOUR De France starts on Saturday. There’ll be an official bit that strays into Italy on stages 17 and 18 and an unofficial bit that will stray in front of your car for a lot longer. For now is the time when all the hoopla about cycling’s most famous event will have every delusional amateur with a High Nelly fixing their muffiny backsides over thong-sized saddles and making for the hills. What joy!

Is there anything more smug than a puffing peleton slowly and painfully making its way up the Wicklow Gap?

It’s like a multi-coloured, shaven-legged bubble of entitlement, full of the virtuous and the good, gulping down great lung-fulls of fresh Wicklow air, propelling themselves painfully against the gradient, using no energy but their own, rejoicing in their own hearty haleness as they weave erratically in front of petrol-guzzling reactionaries, yelling “we’re entitled” at anyone with the temerity to point out that it’s less than polite to take up more than half the road just so you can chat to your mates.

Cyclists do tend to feel very entitled indeed, persuaded as they are that spending hours grinding up and down hills on machines that are demonstrably the most inefficient and ill-equipped for such a job means those of us in cars should feel a little dart of shame every time we eventually accelerate past their masochistic souls.

It’s a very bourgeois conceit which makes the bike such a weird expression of choice. Whether or not the middle-class concept is the greatest achievement of modern society, it remains fundamentally based on aspiration and has there ever been a more blandly ordinary creation in mechanical history than the bicycle.

As a way of getting from A to B in the slowest, most painful, least elegant way, a bike takes some beating. It is fundamentally ridiculous.

It’s easy to see the aspirational in somebody hoicking a javelin a long way: at one time it was important for your self-preservation to be able to take someone’s eye out from a long way away, or at least further away than the other guy. Running faster than him is a pretty elemental motivation too. Harnessing the power of the elements, making the most of engineering expertise, they were all at one stage advancements.

But a bike is the brainchild of a couple of Frenchman who took time off from the perfectly reasonable 1860s’ job of building carriages to create something that couldn’t move as fast a horse, didn’t keep the rain off and which, at a time when the first ironclad warships were scooting around the various empires at unprecedented rates of knot, depended on human suffering to make it work.

How a nation as devoted to la belle vie as the French took cycling so much to their hearts is a mystery. Any self-respecting coquin should ordinarily turn his back on a bike and make for the nearest brothel. But for some reason, this most contrary of nations can’t stop finding Alps to send wiry pieces of Colombian gristle up. It can’t be a coincidence that no Frenchman has won the race in over quarter of a century. They’ve finally twigged how lunatic it is to partake. But to look on and scoff at other people’s pain? How perfectly French is that.

From the Wicklow Gap viewpoint though there is an irony in how the focal point of a professional sport beloved of the worthy worldwide can remain so godawfully toxic.

The defending Tour champion Alberto Contador will again have an eye on finishing in front down the Champs-Élysées this summer. But the other will be in a Court of Arbitration hearing into doping scheduled for just a week after the Tour finishes.

Contador has been cleared by the Spanish federation to ride and the international cycling union and the world anti-doping agency have appealed that decision. However, the hearing has been postponed and will eventually take place over a year after Contador provided his positive test for clenbuterol. He says that’s due to eating contaminated meat. It doesn’t take a whole lot, though, to picture a scenario where the Spaniard wins his fourth Tour and then a couple of weeks later is stripped of it.

And the crucial indicator that no one really believes anything they see on the Tour these days, is that no one will be surprised if just such a scenario unfolds. As a spectator sport, professional cycling is a busted flush, too smelly of sulphur to allow even the most ardent fan to truly believe the extraordinary, even if honestly achieved.

The seemingly never-ending drip feed of ex-team-mates prepared to swear they saw Lance Armstrong use performance-enhancing drugs has revealed a consistency of information that only the most doe-eyed of the American’s admirers can ignore. Quoting how he passed nearly 500 tests in almost 20 years of competition doesn’t cut it anymore.

What fits into the whole cycling vibe though is that many of these guys who whizz up various Alpine peaks as if they’re mere pimples are the ultimate masochists. Most of them don’t dope to avoid work; they dope in order to do more work, so they can propel their outdated, inefficient piece of equipment at a less mundane speed than the competition.

The scale of the task involved in just finishing the Tour, never mind winning it, means the men who tackle the race will always be a source of fascination, no matter what the circumstances.

How else to explain how the Danish-based Saxo Bank, who help finance Contador’s team, have extended their sponsorship. The team is owned by Bjarne Riis, the 1996 Tour winner who subsequently admitted over a decade later taking EPO, growth hormone and cortisone during the race.

Jacques Anquetil, the great champion of the 1960s, at least had the grace never to try and deny he doped. He argued it was ludicrous to pretend you could race the Tour on just water. De Gaulle even condoned it, memorably justifying Anquetil with: “Doping? What doping? Did he or did he not make them play the Marseillaise abroad.”

Which he did: And even a trail of amphetamines left behind by Anquetil and most of his cycling comrades couldn’t deny the stirring glory of the only national anthem ever worth a musical damn.

The Tour has become almost as much a symbol of France as La Marseillaise. It still looks great. But years of lying means it is best watched with the official, delusional, self-justifying soundtrack on mute. We’re surely entitled to more than that.