Nostalgia for Tour de France with The Triplets of Belleville
I just found out that there is also an IndieWeb Movie Club and this month Mark Sutherland has chosen The Triplets of Belleville. It is a film I have seen before and it brought me in a somewhat of nostalgic mood for Tour de France.
I watched Tour de France on TV back in the 1990s, most of it in my parents summerhouse. The whole country watched when Bjarne Riis won in 1996 and that whole era of cycling has an aura of romanticized nostalgia, despite it being also the height of the doping era. Or maybe because of it. I think the whole doping thing was just something most just silently accepted, while the official line of course was a no tolerance policy. Cycling is a sport that have always been about pushing the limits of what a human body can do. 100 years ago, the organizers of the tour was basically proud of how many drugs the participants had to take to endure the brutal stages. It was a part of the sports DNA and I think it was also what made it fascinating to watch. Half of the entertainment value was also the whole drama off the roads, with the Festina doping raids, the constant rumors and test results, and of course the riders always denying every accusation.
I do genuinely think that the sport is cleaner today, but it is hard to deny that it was a different kind of entertaining sport to watch back then. It was more chaotic, adventurous, more daring with individual riders betting everything they had on a single day, and sometimes destroying themselves in the process. Today we have a much more tightly controlled strategic race, where everything is planned from tons of data and metrics, and less by gut feeling. Though that trend isn’t so much about doping, as it was Armstrong who really established that form of control.
So the movie The Triplets of Belleville is showing cycling through a romanticized sense contrasted with the harsh realities of the race, which resonated with my nostalgia for that era. Champion is constantly depicted as this absolute tireless expressionless machine, rhythmically pedaling forward while his opponents are shown with faces of agony and mad filled exhaustion. In that way, Champion is more like Armstrong than the more colorful eccentric riders of the 90s like Pantani, Cipollini and Virenque. But the film still captures the fascination and mythology that resides in the tour.
This turned out to be more of a nostalgic reflection on Tour de France than an actual movie review, but that is exactly why such blog challenges are great, as I probably otherwise wouldn’t have picked up this movie again or made these thematic connections.