Professional road cycling has become the sport I most actively follow in the last few years. For most of my life, it was football (“soccer”) and the GAA, but in recent times, professional cycling has been the one I have watched most. The strange aspect of this – maybe – is that I didn’t learn how to cycle a bike until I was well into adulthood. That was one of those unusual blanks I had in my life… thankfully, I now can ride a bike, and I am working on improving my skills on that front.

So, how did I end up discovering this sport?

2008 Trip to Lagos in Portugal

Rewind the clocks back to 2008, the summer of 2008, July 2008… I was 16 years old and on holiday in Portugal with my parents. We were in Lagos for the fourth time in about six years. Lagos is a beautiful town in the Algarve in southern Portugal. We went there for the first time in 2003, and we loved it. The food was excellent, the beaches were great, the old town was full of history… We hadn’t gone abroad on holiday before then – well, we did when I was far too young to remember – but we really liked Lagos, so we kept returning. We always made sure to go on bus trips to explore the area. My parents rented a car several times, and we really discovered the Algarve and further afield.

Looking back, they were great times, and we had much fun… However, in 2008, maybe because I was 16 rather than 11, perhaps because we were back there for the fourth time, or maybe we were there a bit too long – three weeks instead of two – but I wasn’t as happy to be there as in other years. Of course, I now think maybe I should have enjoyed it more as I haven’t been back to Lagos since then and would dearly love to go… but yeah, I cannot turn back the clock. I do not enjoy very hot weather, so I think it may have been warmer than other years… I do not know. I remember spending quite a lot of time inside the apartment reading books rather than down by the pool…

Dad’s Tour de France Interest

Anyway, every year that we went to Portugal, I remember Dad would always tune in to the Tour de France every so often… I remember – maybe it was 2005 – seeing the end of a stage where Alejandro Valverde beat Lance Armstrong on the stage and not understanding why that didn’t matter overall… I didn’t understand why Dad said, “The Tour is already over.” Surely, Valverde was now in with a chance of winning the thing if he beat the great Lance Armstrong in a sprint. He was 5th or 6th on the overall rankings. But Dad, who had followed the Armstrong years, assured me that it was Lance’s Tour once again.

2006 Champs-Elysée

A year later, we were in Paris – it was 2006 – and somehow, we ended up near the Champs-Elysée as the final stage of the Tour was taking place. Dad was desperate to see this stage, and now I can fully understand him. It is one of the spectacles of sport – the final stage of the Tour on the Champs… However, I couldn’t understand it when he said that the race was already over and that Floyd Landis had won it. Here was me thinking that there was another stage, and he only had a two-minute lead… I didn’t get the inner workings of the sport at all.

We watched the cyclists come in and around, but we were on a hill away from the action. On the one hand, we could see quite a lot of what was happening, but we were pretty far away from the action – they were more like ants moving around in the distance. As I would later discover, professional cycling races are fun to watch live, but you need to be up and close to the action to really experience it. So, we saw it, but still, I wasn’t impressed.

Of course, a couple of days later, Floyd Landis was busted for doping and would eventually be stripped of his Tour de France title. Around 2006 was a very dark time for the sport as cyclists were caught left, right, and centre for doping—and the entire sport was associated with doping. Just before the Tour that year, Jan Ullrich and many other cyclists were busted in Operacion Puerto. That was one of the biggest doping scandals in sports.

2008 Tour de France

So, back to Portugal in July 2008. For whatever reason, I didn’t really want to go down to the pool… Maybe it was a 16-year-old’s embarrassment at being on holiday with his parents, perhaps it was simply too warm for me, maybe I just wasn’t in the swimming pool vibe… but I would spend a fair bit of the hottest time of day in the apartment, and there, dad was tuning into the Tour de France. If we were going to watch this, I needed to know how this whole thing worked, once and for all.

Dad isn’t a big cycling fan, but he generally tunes into the Tour – like my mother doesn’t particularly follow tennis but enjoys watching Wimbledon every year. Dad explained it, and I listened to the commentary – which was in English – it must have been Eurosport or ITV4 or something… We were staying in an apartment owned by an English lady who had many English-language channels in her apartment. Anyway, eventually, I figured out how the whole thing worked… or roughly did anyway.

I was hooked. The Tour de France is a three-week battle where the smallest of gaps and margins can be decisive. That year isn’t considered a stellar year. Maybe it is because it is so close to all the doping scandals. The shadow of the Lance Armstrong years still hung over the sport. Perhaps it was because several of the main characters were later busted – including the rider who finished third, Bernhard Kohl… Another rider, Ricardo Ricco, won two stages and was also found to have been doping… So, it was a fairly scandal-heavy Tour, thinking back on it.

Going into the final week, several riders were separated by less than two minutes… These guys had ridden hundreds and hundreds of kilometres, and with only a few days left, there were only seconds between them! It was set to be a dingdong battle between Cadel Evans, Frank Schleck, Christian Vandevelde, Denis Menchov and the eventual winner Carlos Sastre. It was decided on the Alpe d’Huez by a Carlos Sastre victory, and he held on in the time trial against Cadel Evans to win the general classification.

The Aftermath of the Tour: Cycle Sport & Pro Cycling

After that, and after those weeks of watching Mark Cavendish win sprints, the doping cases, the battles up mountains such as the Alpe d’Huez, the crazy crowds and fans up there… after all that, I wanted to know more about the sport. While at a local magazine shop, I came across the Cycle Sport and Pro Cycling magazines, which had reviews of the Tour. I ended up buying both of them. Here was a whole world that was now open to me! This professional cycling thing has a massive history with stars, controversies and epic races. What I liked about the magazines was they made the stars I had watched over the past couple of weeks into real humans. For some reason, I didn’t want Cadel Evans to win, but then I read a couple of pieces about him and suddenly thought, maybe I should have supported him instead.

Buying those magazines then opened up the whole sport for me. Professional cycling wasn’t just the Tour de France… these guys also competed in the Giro d’Italia and La Vuelta a Espana… There were one-day races, some considered more prestigious than others… There was a World Championship held every year. I bought those magazines almost every month for a couple of years… I started off mainly with “Cycle Sport” but, over time, realised that Pro Cycling was more my style.

Cycle Sport at the time was huge into the sprinter Mark Cavendish. He was the cover star almost every month – including one month where they played speed chess with him… At the time, I thought it was a bit excessive, but now I realise that having a young buck of a sprinter win four Tour de France stages in his second attempt at the race was a pretty big deal. Cavendish was the man in those years – as he regularly won between three and six stages in the Tour – which is incredible when you think about it!

The Appeal of Following a Sport Through Magazines/Books

I didn’t watch that much of the sport. I mostly read about it in these magazines and in books. I used my head to imagine what these events must be like… That is a bit of a strange thing to say in the world of 2025, when we can just watch everything all the time on YouTube.

It was a bit like following football in the 1990s and early 2000s if you didn’t have access to Sky Sports. Yes, you could see the Premier League highlights every Saturday on Match of the Day, but seeing how good the stars not based in England was a challenge.

I didn’t get to watch Zinedine Zidane or Ronaldo Nazario every week around the year 1999… that was reserved for big Champions League matches, the European Championships and the World Cup… As a child, that was actually pretty great… You had to use your imagination most of the time to picture Rivaldo, Ronaldo, Figo, etc. When you read about stories involving Pele and Maradona and the other great names of sport, part of the appeal was that you couldn’t follow all their performances… you couldn’t really see them live all too often – so you appreciated when you could do it.

It was a similar feeling reading about these cycling performances. It brought back a sense of wonder and excitement – a sense of mystery…

2009 Tour de France

I would read these stories and build-ups in Cycle Sport and Pro Cycling almost every month, and then eventually, July would come around – and I would be pretty hyped for the Tour de France! 2009 brought us Alberto Contador’s second Tour victory. He was missing in 2008 due to a doping scandal involving his team. Contador brought a bit of the star power that was missing in 2008…

However, the big story was, of course, the return of Lance Armstrong… Now, there was not only a battle on the road between Contador and his nearest rival, Andy Schleck, but another – more psychological – battle was raging between Contador and Armstrong as they were supposedly teammates. The drama of the sport, combined with this newfound knowledge of the sport and the protagonists, made it all so exciting for me.

The Next Couple of Years

I followed the Tour for the next couple of years – 2010 and 2011 (the 2011 Tour battle between the Schlecks, Thomas Voekler, and Cadel Evans was an epic!) – but by 2012, with new responsibilities and work during the summers and such, I couldn’t really follow the Tour. It is difficult to do so when you are in the office all day. Then when I returned from work, I was not much in the mood to watch the highlights for whatever reason.

That was also around the time when the Lance Armstrong scandal really hit the fan… Of course, it was clear from the books about him that I had read that his supposed cleanliness – “drug-free” victories – were questioned throughout his career… but the extent of the issue was really something. I remember in 2012 devouring the book “The Secret Race” by Lance’s former teammate Tyler Hamilton. Dad brought it over to Germany for me to read when I was there on Erasmus. They only visited for a week, so I read it in two or three days!

Drifting Away From the Sport

It was also when Team Sky were starting to dominate the sport, and I didn’t like how they raced. They had so much more money than all the other teams, so they would buy up a lot of the best talent and use them as helpers for their main stars – Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome. Their style of marginal gains is good to read about and makes sense, but it didn’t make for much entertainment. Tadej Pogacar also has the strongest team in pro cycling – with riders like Juan Ayuso, Joao Almeida and Adam Yates working for him – but I do not believe anyone can say he is boring!

So, I drifted away from the sport almost completely. I remember being able to watch quite a lot of the Tour in 2014, but then I did not return for several years. It wasn’t a sudden decision or some big event that changed my view. It was like losing touch with a good friend from a particular period of life.

Over time, I stopped buying the magazines, reading them, and keeping up to date with the sport, and it fell out of habit to check the results of big races.

I remember reading about how the 2019 Tour was a very exciting battle between Julian Alaphilippe, Thibaut Pinot, Geraint Thomas, and Egan Bernal, but I thought, “Oh yeah, I used to follow this…” and didn’t look into it anymore.

Rediscovering Professional Cycling: Summer 2022

However, I did end up rediscovering professional cycling again in 2022 and have been following it regularly since then. In fact, since returning to following the sport I have definitely increased my knowledge of how the sport works and am a lot more into it than I was back then.

However, how I rediscovered professional cycling is for another blog article!