A highly ranked professional cyclist will compete in more than a dozen races each year, of varying lengths: solitary time trials, one-day classics, serpentine “criterium” races through city streets. But the most storied events, the ones that inspire paeans from Ernest Hemingway and docuseries from Netflix, are the grand tours. Each is three weeks long and unspools across varied terrain. Some days the road winds through Alpine villages, past cows and sunburned spectators who look like extras in “The Sound of Music.” Some days the path shoots skyward — those days are for the climbers. Other courses are flat, stretching across broad expanses of vines or wheat — those days are for the sprinters. There are legs fought on gravel and on cobblestones, each with their own specialists. Rarely do the riders tackle less than 100 miles in a day.
I started watching the grandest of the grand tours, the Tour de France, around the time I started kindergarten, when my father was swept up in Lance Armstrong fever. I have watched it every summer since: more than two decades of races. The early years would turn out to be a bleak and unromantic time to follow cycling, as top rider after top rider, Armstrong included, tested positive for banned substances and was stripped of his titles. But as my childhood heroes fell amid excuses and apologies, I also started to notice just how little their titles or triumphs had to do with the joys of watching a grand tour. The beauty was all in the evolution of the race itself, shepherded by all the oft-forgotten teammates who maneuvered around the stars, on behalf of the stars. Deep in the scrum of the peloton or on its periphery, among the riders whose names sat at the bottom of the roster — that’s where the magic happened.
And yet it’s the stars who are the focus of “Tour de France: Unchained,” one of Netflix’s sport documentaries-cum-psychodramas. The show, now in its third season, is obsessively interested in the talents at the front of the peloton, people like Tadej Pogacar or Jonas Vingegaard. It tracks not just their rivalries and power struggles but also their personal demons and their places in the business of cycling, much of it revealed in direct-to-camera confessionals that feel more like “Real Housewives” cutaways than anything in the race’s live stream. One major plotline revolves around mismatched resources. Pogacar’s team has a slate of ritzy sponsors that includes the Emirates aviation group; we see their penthouse accommodations and their retreats in Dubai, while competitors like the longstanding French team Groupama-FDJ operate with a third or even a quarter of the budget. “Unchained” presents these teams’ managers fretting about cost-cutting or sweating profusely as they hand out roadside water bottles, complete with theme music reminiscent of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
The truth is that grand-tour cycling does not make for action-packed or convenient viewing.
This is the formula Netflix has landed on for its competition documentaries: Skirt the event itself and get to the juicy stuff behind the scenes. The focus is on the training and the preparation, the business and the personalities, who will win and who will be mad about it. The trouble is that once you watch a few of these series — on cycling or Formula 1 racing or polo — you start to notice the beats repeating, as if the same televisual Mad Lib were just being filled in with the specific nouns, adjectives and verbs of the sport in question. There will be an underdog, a top dog, a loose cannon, a search for redemption, a David-and-Goliath struggle that pits a sovereign wealth fund against a sweaty Frenchman.
This impulse to dramatize is reasonable: The truth is that grand-tour cycling does not make for action-packed or convenient viewing. Watching is an endurance sport in itself, with riders on the road for hours each day. Even Ernest Hemingway lamented how difficult it was to capture the sport’s beauty: “I have started many stories about bicycle racing,” he wrote, “but have never written one that is as good as the races are.” Television has not done much better. It is tempted, always, to accouter every race with narrative overlays and behind-the-scenes intrigue, techno beats and psychological strife. The team at Netflix would not be the first to doubt the entertainment quotient of watching wiry men pedal for hours on end.
But the most hypnotic parts of a grand tour have little to do with the obvious sources of drama. They can be found, I’ve learned, by watching the domestiques. For every “general classification” contender in the Tour de France, there are up to seven domestiques, or servant-riders, available on any given day. The domestique is both the sacrificial lamb and the draft ox of bike riding. He’ll ride through the throng to ferry feedbags to his teammates. He’ll hurl his body into the wind so that his leader can catch a break riding in the slipstream. He’ll use his body to block other teams’ riders from sneaking into advantageous positions; he’ll install himself as a pacemaker at the head of the peloton; he’ll pierce through the group to cut a path for teammates behind him. He is the foot soldier and the field officer, the spy and the tactician. Watching his movements, you can often start to divine his team’s priorities — whether they’re aiming to win a particular stage, say, or whether they’re saving their power for another day.
Now, when I watch the Tour, I can’t take my eyes off these guys. Everything most thrilling about the race is happening in the welter of carbon fiber and limbs where the domestiques live. There, the race is a process, and you can see the mundane poetry of extreme effort. This work is ill suited to the heroes-and-villains matrix of a conventional sports documentary, especially when so much of it is undertaken as a sacrifice, not a quest for individual glory. Sometimes a rider serves as a domestique for just a day, when a teammate needs it — but sometimes it’s his whole career, years and years spent toiling to help other people win.
Once you get lost in the live feed of bodies cycling down endless roads, you see action play out that feels richer than anything in the inevitable highlight reel. When I was a kid, with empty summer days stretching before me, I would try to watch every second of it. In 2009, I saw Jens Voigt’s alarming crash on a descent in the Alps, the blood on his broken cheekbone — but I also saw the approximately 50 hours he spent guiding Andy Schleck into position for a second-place finish. For years, I watched Mark Renshaw drag himself over hills to reach the flats where his sprinter, Mark Cavendish, could race out from his slipstream and seize the win. These days, I see super-domestiques like Rafal Majka and Sepp Kuss take heroic lunges at the course, setting punishing paces that scuttle even the boldest challengers and let Pogacar and Vingegaard save their own heroics for when their legs are fresh. More than any sporting event or class of athlete I can think of, the grand tour and its domestiques mimic the metaphorical contours of life itself. The days are long, and the hard work is usually done for someone else’s benefit. The mountains are steep, the rewards are few and thrills come in spurts. A sprint looms when you’re already dead tired. Your nemesis receives an influx of cash from an Emirati holding company.
Hemingway did manage to write about cycling, and he did it well. In “The Sun Also Rises,” amid bullfights and brawls over women, Jake Barnes comes across a horde of cyclists in repose. He watches as they drink wine — lots of it. Their skin has baked in the sun, and the race leader is covered in boils. “They did not take the race seriously except among themselves,” Hemingway writes. “They had raced among themselves so often that it did not make much difference who won.” The cyclists wear helmets now, and I would wager that they use more sunscreen and drink less wine, but Hemingway was right: The thrill is in the race itself. The win is extra.
Jane Ackermann is a research editor at the magazine.
Source photographs for illustration above: Marco Bertorello/AFP, via Getty Images; Michael Steele/Getty Images; Guillaume Horcajuelo/Getty Images; David Rumsey Map Center/Stanford Libraries; Bibliothèque nationale de France.
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