I have been reading "Tour de Lance" by Bill Strickland. I always read books about cycling this time of year. I thought the following discription of the tour was fun.
A popular way of trying to convey the magnitude of the Tour de France to a general audience is to compare it to the Super Bowl happening every day for a month. That’s not a bad start. It’s actually as if the Super Bowl were played for twenty-one straight days in the middle of the summer, starting each day in a new town and ending in another as it traveled across the United States like a barnstorming circus. And each Super Bowl would be held not in a stadium where only a lucky eighty thousand or so could attend and the athletes were physically sequestered from the fans, but right out on the streets – the players running their patterns close enough to the daily millions lining the road to be smelled, heard, touched, doused with water, and sprayed with beer, the fans able to leap out in the road and run beside their favorite players, screaming into their ears and patting their backs. Occasionally, a player would catapult off the side of a cliff.
