What you won't find when you tidy up: for example the more than 40-year-old novel "Salz im Kaffee" by the former Tour de France bard Hans Blickensdörfer, which begins with the wonderful quote: "Only one sees the sun in the spokes, who moves his wheel himself.”
Today's spokes no longer flash, but the sentence is still amazingly up-to-date.
It's about the word "self".
In the novel, a young racing driver is suspected of doping with "dynamite", i.e. he is said to have thrown in prohibited substances.
No fraud not committed
For a few years, however, some bicycles have also been doped, with little electric motors hidden in the frame – in other words, they are being transformed into a kind of high-tech pensioner bikes.
Controls in this regard seem to be insufficient on the tour.
And as the old saying goes: there is no possible fraud that is not committed.
Do the people even contemplating such interventions know what's at stake?
What hasn't changed since Blickensdörfer: The Tour de France is an archaic human drama, a monument to crossing physical and mental boundaries.
Anyone who installs auxiliary engines steals her black soul.