Ned Boulting has a Tourshaped hole in his life
Ned remains in the grip of the Tour de France
Ned is the main commentator for ITV’s Tour de France coverage and editor of The Road Book, now in its second edition. He also tours his own one-man-show.
“I’d been exposed to such an intense dose of bravery, absurdity and drama I knew I would never be the same person again”
As I suspect I have mentioned, I have been eating a predominantly vegetarian diet for a long time now. However, I just had some roast beef. We roasted it last night, when it wasn’t quite rested properly, and it was a bit average. But overnight, in the fridge, it has become a delicacy.
I write these words on the suggestion of my eldest child who, sitting opposite me and also stuffing her face with a few slices of cold roast joint thought it might make an interesting read in this column. You might think beef to be irrelevant on the pages of a cycling magazine. But there’s no cycling, so, beef it is. Unless you’ve got any better ideas. I can wait.
Actually, to give her some credit, she managed to fine tune her red-meat column proposal by linking it back to, however tenuously, the Tour de France. ‘Why don’t you write about the best beef you ever ate at the Tour de France?’ she managed to suggest, still chewing between huge mouthfuls of sliced bovine. ‘Because it’s a cycling magazine, you idiot,’ I responded, parentally. ‘Cyclists eat beef, don’t they?’ It has been a long lockdown. So, here goes:
The best beef I ever ate at the Tour de France was at a restaurant somewhere fairly anonymous in France, probably near Troyes or Nevers. It came in the form of a bourguignon and was served, late at night, on a terrace, under the cover of an old plane tree, near a stone fountain, in a tiny hamlet. There had been other things on the menu than the beef stew that we were eventually served by the robust and frankly terrifying madame who ran the bistro. But even though we’d tried to order them, we were told that we should change our minds and have the beef. I’d wanted the fish but got beef. Turned out she was right. When it arrived, it was cooked to that melting point that beef achieves when it has been left in a pot with bay leaves and red wine for an entire decade.
This column has become a family lockdown enterprise, and I have just read out what I have written to my wife and she has suggested that, for the second half, I bring it back to cycling. She’s right. So here’s why beef matters...
It’s July. It’s the first July I have spent at home in 17 years, not at the Tour de France. I ate that heavenly beef stew during the first week of my first Tour in 2003. I know with total certainty what I was feeling; a mixture of wonder, awe, amusement and love. France had intoxicated me and the Tour had, too. In the space of a few short days, I had been exposed to such an intense dose of bravery, absurdity and drama that I already knew I would never be the same person again. All those concentrated human values had found their way into the meal I was forcibly presented with. As I finished the last salty, wonderful forkful of stew and, pushing my chair back, put my hands behind my head in contentment, I was, what’s the word? Happy. The Tour de France makes me happy. I’ve written three books about it, commentated on four editions of it and reported on 13 more. But, until this moment of beefy enlightenment, I have never been able to articulate it in such clear terms. Its absence is shocking. My life is impoverished. I will find it hard to replace it.
Once this sport grasps hold of you, you are condemned forever to care. You will care about the weather, the cobbles, the climbs, the teams, the GC, the wind, the churches, the fields, the sunflowers, the punctures, the crashes, the finish lines and feed zones, in ways that you would have found unimaginable. You will care about the countries the races traverse, the landscapes they cut through, the seasons they fill. You will, ultimately, care about the things you place in your mouth that will forever remind you of a moment in time, a place, a feeling.
A forkful of beef is like a race; it is here to confer joy. This is the way the world works. But, I’m back to being mostly vegetarian after this. That seems appropriate in 2020.