Tour de France: SZ column “On the roadside” – Sport

Nothing works without this sticker. Anyone who wants to report on the tour will receive a large adhesive strip for the windscreen of the car from the organizers. This marks you as part of the convoy and then you can get to the start and finish easily. And that basically allows you to break some traffic rules. With the sticker on the car, you can, with the permission of the police, drive through many a red traffic light. You can also swerve to the left in the long traffic jams that form after a mountain stage and join the evacuation general, with which the gendarmerie escorts the tour entourage out of crowded valleys. And if necessary, you can also place yourself under the absolute ban on stopping, at least if you are not blocking access to a hospital, but a space reserved by a bank for the smooth handling of a money transport (“interdit sauf transport de fonds”).

But you can’t afford to do everything with a sticker. One of the greatest sins imaginable: driving in the wrong direction on a section of the route closed for the stage. Even if it’s only 500 meters because you stupidly drove past the gas station. Then it can happen that a rigorous tour supervisor rips the sticker off the car. And in the unwritten code of the tour entourage, unfortunately, there is nothing about the fact that the stickers allow you to use your cell phone while driving to, um, yes, of course not to write a Whatsapp, but to record a spontaneous thought using the dictation function .

Just like on the winding downhill run to Cluses, the peloton has long since left, now you’re driving behind them and screaming in a very slow curve… um, a thought comes to mind that you really want to hold on to, take a quick look at your cell phone – and am At the end of the curve straight into the eyes of a gendarme sitting in his car. No sooner has the device been put to one side than the police car starts moving, turns around and rushes along a few curves behind you with the blue lights flashing – until the next gendarme appears further down the street, where the blue light driver stops and lets the cell phone offender drive. The sticker stays on, the tour continues.