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concoction called
Pot Belge
. And still they fete him at the Tour. Officially. Festina is a name
synonymous with that shameful 1998 Tour which began in Ireland but exploded when their
soigneur
and principal drug runner Willy Voet was arrested. And still they remain a Tour sponsor.
    For Rod Ellingworth, Team Sky’s master planner, the road book is the bible. So on the day he gets it, he riffles through the pages, checking the details that underpin his planning. He gets
to page 46 with its photo of Virenque and it disgusts and confuses him. Ellingworth can be diplomatic, understated and restrained when talking about most things. Doping is different and in his eyes
Virenque has stood for everything he despises about the sport. He stops at page 46, turns the page over to check there’s nothing too important on the other side, and tears Richard from the
book and bins him.
    Returning to the Tour was straightforward for me once the sport had accepted the truth about Armstrong. There would be a new grammar, I hoped. Every new rider, every new
effort, every iconic stage wouldn’t be compared with how things were when people believed in Lance.
    Every living winner of the Tour has been invited back to this centenary race. Every champion welcomed except the evil one. It makes me laugh a little. Yes, Armstrong is no longer a past winner
but plenty of known dopers are (Riis, Ullrich, Contador, to name just three of the more recent) and this parade of champions is best enjoyed by those with the ability to suspend their
disbelief.
    Still, I’m glad that he who once controlled everything can no longer get on the list of invites. His fall has given the sport a new chance but this monster’s head has been severed
many times before and always it has reappeared.
    Sure enough, on the day the race begins, Lance gives an interview to the French quality daily
Le Monde
. He is determined not to go away.
    The interview is the usual greatest hits collection from the cave of his disgrace. The writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft summed up its content perfectly in the
New Republic
.
    Yet again he snivelled that, ‘I didn’t invent doping. I simply participated in a system. I am a human being.’ I suggest that readers could try a logical
     experiment, adapting that defence for persons accused of any other offence, from rape to racketeering to war crimes. He also said that the devastating report last fall from the U.S. Anti-Doping
     Agency ‘did not draw a true picture of cycling from the end of the 1980s to the present day. It succeeded perfectly in destroying one man’s life, but didn’t benefit cycling at
     all’ – his life, that is, rather than those ravaged by the scourge of doping.
    Still, I dream, we will make new memories and finally their weight will crush the past.
    Stage One brought the predicted carnage, but with a side order of comedy. First though, Chris Froome, one of the most accident-prone men ever to reach the higher echelons of
this sport, had his first mishap. The Tour has two starts. It begins with a 3km ceremonial ride through the town. The riders stretch and preen, the populace cheers, the sun shines. The mood is set.
These few kilometres aren’t for racing, they are a neutral zone.
    Alone of the peloton, Froome punctured in the neutral zone. A more superstitious man might have gone home but he, while the mechanic put on the new wheel, would have thought, ‘My good luck
that it happened here.’
    The carnage came later. Chaos among the athletes and their bikes and parts of each were left on the scorching roads of Corsica in pile-ups and spills.
    These scenes of fallen riders and running medics went on as those gathered at the finish line were treated to a pantomime so bizarre and comical that it would have embarrassed a vicar running a
village fete. As the peloton steamed towards the finish in Bastia, the Australian Orica-GreenEDGE team bus was going through the finish line when its roof got caught on the timing