The bicycle may be a most ecologically-sound mode of transport, but the great bike race is a different proposition. While some attempts have been made to offset the event’s carbon footprint in recent years, there is no escaping the sad fact that the Tour de France was not an altogether inappropriate target for peaceful environmental protests of the kind witnessed on stage 10 to Megève.
The logistics of bringing a rolling village of approximately 4,000 people around France has made it so. As of last year, ASO claims that 100% of the carbon emissions produced by the Tour organisation itself are offset, but those calculations do not factor in the emissions produced by the team staff, journalists, sponsors, corporate guests, fans and assorted suiveurs following the race across its three weeks.
In 2021, when QuickStep announced that they had become the WorldTour’s first carbon-neutral team, they published a sobering calculation of the emissions they had needed to offset during the season. The estimated 1288 tons of CO2 produced by the team in a year is equivalent to driving a car 179 times around the world or making 539 return flights between Brussels and New York.
Such calculations were far from the minds of the men chasing the stage victory from the breakaway on the road to Megève on Tuesday afternoon, and it was understandable that the riders in the move were more concerned with the stoppage itself than the message behind it when they spoke to reporters immediately after the finish.
Alberto Bettiol (EF Education-EasyPost) was alone at the head of the race with 37km remaining when he encountered the protestors from the ‘Dernière Renovation’ climate action group, which had made a similar demonstration at the French Open tennis earlier this year. The eight protestors sat in the road and set off a flare as the race approached, with some wearing t-shirts bearing the legend “We have 989 days left” in a call for urgent action on the climate crisis.
The Italian was able to ride past the protestors, as was the chasing group behind him, but it was clear that the body of the peloton – not to mention the cavalcade of cars behind them – would not be able to make it through safely. The commissaires quickly decided to stop the race until police had removed the protestors from the road. After a stoppage of 12 minutes or so, first Bettiol and then the chasers were allowed to set off with their buffers over the peloton intact.
“I saw them from a distance, and I knew…
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