Medical Control
European men’s road cycling is a professional sport, run more along the lines of Major League Baseball and NFL than those of a traditional Olympic sport such as swimming. As such, it is a business, and like any business, is desperately looking for a way to survive this crisis and is carrying forth as though it will. In order to greatly enhance those chances of survival, cycling needs the Tour de France to run this year because if it wasn’t clear before it certainly is now: The Tour de France is professional cycling.
MLB has no intention of canceling their baseball season and are looking for “less infected” areas of the country to play their games in front of live audiences. A.S.O. and the French government, working in partnership, are ahead in that decision-making process having adopted an approach, like that of Japanese baseball, to play to empty stadiums or in cycling’s case, on deserted roads and in empty towns for a purely televised sporting event (It seems that the Japanese ball games make for fascinating TV as the audience hears the banter between players and all the sounds of the game). Anyone in business and politics is looking ahead at this new landscape, attempting to understand how it will function and trying to determine and plan for when and how reentry into a functioning world will begin, and, crucially, how quickly they can do it.
Any thought of holding the Tour is based on the hopes – and prayers – that there will be, in three-month’s time, much more developed testing protocols, that the social isolating will have had a positive effect, and that scientists and doctors will have developed mitigation strategies to help us all out of this. If not, we’ll all be heading into Mad Max territory anyway so any of this discussion will be moot. The following are my ideas on how the Tour could work, ideas not based on any scientific or medical knowledge it is important to state, rather practical suggestions on some directions things could take.
This is the chance for the French government to shine, to create a united, country-wide effort to save a national icon. The Tour, so embedded in the national fabric, is like their Statue of Liberty, but one that rips through the villages of France for three-weeks in July. It can only happen, in fact, with a powerful public-private sector partnership and as a global showcase for all of their combined national political, medical and commercial efforts to combat the virus.
Testing systems able to give immediate results would be the key to this effort. The Tour, which would be, with reduced structural crews since there wouldn’t be spectators to control, media – besides the world feed TV crew – all virtual, no Publicity Caravan nor VIP, perhaps a 1000-person entourage, could represent a small, controlled population for the doctors and scientists to monitor and learn from for the world at large. The entourage, properly separated out in the abundance of empty hotels, would be constantly tested. The racers would need to be isolated in pre-Tour training camps and monitored for clean bills of health before being released to race. The riders and entourage would need to understand and accept that they are in fact performing a service to humanity by acting as a control group, showing how normal life can continue through this terrible period. Spectators would be banned from the side of the roads, starts and finishes, in fact, the Tour could serve as a social isolating tool as everyone would have something to watch on TV from 11 am to 5pm in July.
It is crucial to look forward and plan for the future. I find it inspiring that the planning for the America baseball season and the Tour de France is continuing, that there is faith in our collective abilities to grab ahold of this problem and contain it, that life as we know it won’t permanently grind to a halt. Circumstance may overwhelm and dash any of these hopes, but for now, acting as though life will continue on is the only way.