How does the Tour de France really affect you? MyZA

Michael O’Reilly from On Your Bike states his views on this question:

Australia’s Orica-GreenEDGE on their way to winning the team time trial in this year’s Tour de France. Photo: Getty Images

If you ride a bicycle regularly, do you have to care about the Tour de France?

I’ve been thinking about this after a recent exchange with a fellow cyclist, who said everyone in his office knows he cycles to work, and every July they want to talk to him about the world’s biggest race.

“It’s crazy, because I couldn’t give a rat’s about the event,” he said, or words to that effect.

It’s not just the Tour. A larger question is, what impact does the professional sport of cycling – with its victories, its star performers and its controversies, many of them doping-related – have on everyday cycling, and the perception of cycling by the wider community?

Britain is undergoing something of a cycling renaissance at present, and many have claimed that recent sporting successes have helped to drive acceptance and awareness of cycling.

Last year’s Tour de France win by Bradley Wiggins (subsequently knighted) and a fistful of cycling medals at the 2012 London Olympics certainly kept Spandex in the spotlight.

Of course, this razzle-dazzle is only part of the picture. Consider London, with its congestion charge, a well-funded share bike scheme that’s not strangled by helmet laws, and plans to spend a further $1 billion on cycling infrastructure – sensible and forward-thinking measures to make the city cleaner and more liveable in the future.

Did Cadel Evans’ Tour victory in 2011 help bring a better attitude to cycling in Australia? Will media coverage of Orica-GreenEDGE’s four-day hold on the yellow jersey in this year’s event have a beneficial effect on interactions between motorists and cyclists? It’s hard to know.