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jersey I wanted signed and the pen I had pinched off someone standing to my side. Probably a child.
    He smiled politely. But looked away and rode off.
    ‘Yup’, I muttered to myself. ‘Let’s just pretend that never happened.’
    I handed the pen back, and created a diversion. ‘Let’s go and get a drink. I want a beer. Coke, kids?’ My daughters trudged off with me in the general direction of fizz and sugar. Voeckler had done it again. For the second time, he’d turned me into a fan.
    On Tuesday, 28 June 2011 Julie Voeckler gave birth to her daughter Lila. Her husband was at her side. He might have been forgiven for spending the previous few days gazing anxiously from the Europcar calendar on the Voeckler family wall, and back again to the sight of Julie’s full-term shape as little Lila bided her time. For Voeckler will have been sweating slightly at the prospect of the mother of all fixture clashes. A new child and the Tour de France. Sometimes life does capricious things like that.
    A lot was at stake. The previous autumn, Voeckler had rescued his team from extinction after their sponsor Bouygues Telecom had decided that the best way to market their prestigious B-Box (whatever one of those was) was no longer to stick its logo on the diminutive French Champion’s Lycra. In short, they quit, taking their money with them. Voeckler had offers from a clutch of other teams, but remained loyal to the roster of riders who had been left high and dry.
    Eventually, and solely because of Voeckler’s very particular charisma, a sponsor came forward. Europcar, who charge people money to drive cars they don’t own in an uncharacteristically reckless fashion, pinned their green flag to Tommy’s bony backside. They did so, not out of any great sentiment, but purely in the hope that Voeckler would make enough of a splash on the Tour for people like me to write sentences like this that contained the word ‘Europcar’ in future publications.
    So the new father to a baby girl (he and Julie already had a son, Mahe) had added a considerable weight of responsibility on his slight frame. His teammates’ jobs were saved, for now, but the Tour had to deliver. A bit like Julie had delivered on the Tuesday, only without the drugs.
    Four days later, on the Saturday, the Tour rolled out of his home départment, the Vendée. Predictably, he was subjected to a welter of affectionate attention.
    Eight days after that, and just twelve days into Lila’s life, he crossed the finishing line in the main square of Saint-Flour, a town built on a rugged volcanic rock in the heart of the Massif Central. In that instant, and quite unexpectedly, he took over the lead of the Tour de France. Again.
    The genesis of this story was, of course, the instant that Johnny Hoogerland and Juan Antonio Flecha were so famously wiped out by the French TV car. Overtaking the riders on a narrow, tree-lined country road, it suddenly swerved erratically to the right, and straight into the Tour de France. Flecha, who never stood a chance, slammed onto the tarmac with violent suddenness. Hoogerland catapulted over his handlebars, towards a barbed-wire fence and into cycling immortality. It was the defining image of the 2011 Tour. But there we will leave Johnny for now, unpicking the steely thorns from his backside. We will, of course, return to him, but up the road something else of huge significance was happening, almost incidentally.
    Voeckler was the lead rider in the breakaway when the car struck. He looked over his shoulder, saw the crash, then stepped hard on his pedals and accelerated out of the shot.
    Some of this might have been the pure adrenalin of the moment. Yet, like a darts player totting up the permutations of an unlikely checkout, Voeckler knew instinctively what to do. In that split second, he had calculated the consequences. Hoogerland was just twenty-one seconds down on him in the General Classification, a gap that the Dutchman, a more naturally