Tune Into The Tour de Taste
July 8, 2004

What do you get when you combine the World Series, the Super Bowl and the finals of American Idol? For cyclists it’s called the Tour de France, a bacchanalia of bikes, buff bodies, and OLN for three straight weeks in July. I love to track every grimace, crash, and scandal that erupts during this soap opera on wheels-2,103 miles of what is arguably the most challenging athletic event in the world.

Are you wondering what cycling has to do with food? A lot. It’s a Tour of France: Burgundy’s Epoisses cheese, Provence’s nicoise salads, Languedoc’s foie gras, pofiteroles from Paris, the menu goes on for miles. The Tour riders, my heroes, push hard to end each day’s stage in a new region. Tour fans have to push hard too: each evening I cook a meal and uncork a wine that salutes the cuisine of that day’s stage finish. It takes a lot of stamina to eat French food every evening. (This effort, in turn, demands that I ride more often, which tends to make me hungrier, which…well, now you get the food-cycling relationship.)

There is a huge food irony at play in this event, too. When five-time winner Lance Armstrong prepares for the Tour he trains eight hours a day, then he weighs his food, carefully monitoring calories. During the Tour race, these guys are riding and climbing at a brutal pace, burning up 5,000-7,000 calories a day for 21 days. These dudes are hungry. The biggest daily challenge they face is to eat enough to replace their fuel so they won’t cannibalize their muscle mass. They actually get sick of eating- can you imagine such a thing? In France?!

I was curious about what these athletes actually eat during this pedal fest, so I talked with Williston’s local bike hero, retired pro Andy Bishop, who rode an amazing four Tour de France races during his career. Andy explained that riders eat all day long in the saddle from bags called “musettes”. The musettes are prepared for riders by team “soigeurs” who serve as both surrogate mom and masseuse throughout the Tour. The bags contain water, Coke, small sandwiches, fruit tarts, power bars, candy and chunks of fresh pineapple, Andy’s favorite item. Three hours before race time the cyclists eat big portions of spaghetti, omelets and rice, shying away from hard-to-digest dairy products. They eat high calorie foods like muesli, meat, pasta and dessert to refuel post-ride. Then they are poured into the rack to rest and repeat the next day.

Yes, it’s a suffer-fest, but you don’t have to feel pain to be apart of the the Tour de France. Over the next few weeks why not dust off your bike and go for a spin, open a French cookbook, enjoy a few fine meals, or tune into the Tour recap (evenings on channel 126) to watch sports history being made as American Lance Armstrong goes for a new world record: Tour De France victory number six.  Bon Appetit!

Kim Dannies is a graduate of La Varenne Cooking School in France. She lives in Williston, VT with her husband, Jeff, and three college–aged daughters who come and go. ©2008