Tour de France:The Tour de France party lives on despite the death of the race after a long illness, writes Richard Williamsin Castelsarrasin.
The race may be as good as over but the fete continues. The Tour de France came to Castelsarrasin yesterday and the people of this small town in the department of Tarn-et-Garonne saw no reason to put on their mourning dress.
They had woken up to read the solemn obituaries. "La mort du Tour," proclaimed the cover of Liberation while, inside, an editorial called for the race to be halted. The front page of France Soir was made up to represent an austere death notice announcing the demise of the Tour "at the age of 104, after a long illness".
But Castelsarrasin had been booked for a party and most of its 11,000 inhabitants chose to take no notice of the obituarists. The Relais des Deux Mers had put out enough trestle tables to seat a couple of hundred drinkers while the Restaurant St Louis was offering a Menu du Tour packed with regional specialities. Shop windows were festooned with bicycle wheels and racing jerseys and above the doorway of Jean-Michel Coiffure hung an old sit-up-and-beg bike freshly painted in yellow, the Tour's colour.
Tourists mingled with the locals. Barbara and Steve Walter from England had ridden in on their road bikes from their holiday home in Hautefage-la-Tour and found a table at the Cafe de la Place, where they reminisced about watching the prologue in London and the first stage in Kent - "so exciting and full of promise," Barbara said - and spoke with regret about the events of the past few days, including the ignominious departures of Alexandr Vinokourov and Michael Rasmussen, and the withdrawal of Bradley Wiggins's Cofidis team.
"I'm saddened," said Steve (54) a former professional cyclo-cross rider. "And I can't believe what happened to Vinokourov. He must have known that he was going to be tested."
"Funnily enough," Steve continued, "I think it's a cleaner race this year than it has been for some time. You haven't seen guys who can't climb going to the front in mountain stages and not even breathing through their mouths."
While the couple rode off to find a viewing spot on the final climb of the day, other spectators were starting to crowd the barriers lining the last couple of kilometres.
Parents fussed over their children and a dozen elderly patients lined up in their wheelchairs in front of the local hospital, several of them sporting polka-dotted king-of-the-mountains caps hurled from a passing vehicle.
First they enjoyed the ritual passage of the promotional caravan, with its dancers and jugglers, its bicycling kangaroos and giant characters from The Simpsons, its showers of sweets, keyrings, super-market vouchers and sun-hats, and an acrobat with a nozzle spraying the grateful crowd, baking under a cloudless, clear blue sky, with ice-cold mineral water.
Claude Duffau (65), a retired schoolteacher, stood outside his house on the Boulevard Marceau Favre, just by the 1km-to-go sign, helping his three-year-old grand-daughter to collect up the sweets and the keyrings. "I don't think they should stop the race," he said. "Many people enjoy this kind of festival. Even French people enjoy watching it on television and looking at parts of France they don't know - the churches, the castles and so on. It gives us an opportunity to get to know France better.
"As for the cycling, we don't want to have to think about something like the doping. But I'm a cyclist myself and I know that what's happened this year is a good thing. There's a profound disbelief in the Tour, so for the future of the race this is the best that could have happened."
Near the 500m sign, nine-year-old Lucas Seguela was busy collecting the day's spoils under the eye of his father, Thierry (40), a carpenter, who confessed to a feeling of disquiet over the implications of the doping scandal.
"It certainly worries me when it comes to encouraging young people to take up cycling, or even sport in general," he said.
As the sideshow melted away and the riders approached, the excitement grew.
With the arrival of the leaders, spectators leaned over and drummed their hands on the advertising boards. Cheers went up as the first riders flew past in a blur of Lycra.
The sun shone. The music played. While the rest of the world has averted its gaze, in France the party goes on.
