etnobofin

Today, the sports and marketing circus known as Le Tour de France came to town. The city ground to a halt for 12 hours while obscenely fit men sweated around a 38km course chased by thousands of photographers, helicopters, physiotherapists, policemen and advertisers. One of the oldest sporting contests, this year Le Tour is in its 96th “édition”. It’s certainly the biggest single annual event in France, apart from the opening of Carla Bruni’s handbag.

I got into town about one o’clock, and rather than heading for the starting line on Place de la Comédie, I camped out for the afternoon at the top end of the old town by the Arc de Triomphe. Peyrou was obviously the place to be, because Germany’s Tourteufel, Didi Senft joined us in the crowd. He’s the ultimate Tour fanboy, having followed every Tour since 1993. You can see him in the background of a couple of my photos.

Le Tour is of course, an enormous sponsorship opportunity, and the race itself is preceded by a parade of sponsors trucks – Nestlé, Caisse d’Epargne, L’Equipe, Skoda – and they seem to be cheered just as enthusiastically as the cyclists who follow.

Then, finally  came the riders. Today’s race was a team time trial, so rather than one big peloton of riders whizzing past, there was a team every 7 minutes for most of the afternoon.

I didn’t stick around to see Lance Armstrong and the Astana team, who were last off the starting blocks: the sun was strong, and I thought I’d jump a tram home before the crowds started ebbing back to their daily lives.

There’ll be a big cleanup tonight in Montpellier. Here, the circus has come and gone, but continues onwards for another 20 days, sweating, grinding and advertising itself towards Paris. Allez !

For those readers who haven’t visited Montpellier, here’s a little video-taste of the town (well, the historic centre at least).

I’ve just got a FlipCam MinoHD for a new web project I’m starting. It’s pretty much the world’s smallest HD camera. Today I took it into town to try it out. Here’s a quick edit of some street scenes I shot. The camerawork and the angles are not great, but I’m learning.

As anyone who follows this blog will notice, there hasn’t been much activity over the past week. Several topics were mooted. (Inter alia: racism in France, quality of life vs income, general annoyance at swish travel writers and foodies who rave about holidays in Languedoc, but have have never spent more than a fortnight here at a stretch, treating the place as some kind of thyme-scented culinary theme-park for their fabulous friends from Manhattan without regard for the region’s crippling rate of unemployment).

But none of these ideas ever got past the neural sub-editor in my blogocortex. In addition, a combination of heat, thesis-writing and job-hunting has been eating into time normally spent composing blog posts.

So, here’s a glass of wine from last night’s Estivales, and it comes with the hope that there’ll be some more action soon. A la votre.