The whole point of living in Paris is going to the café every morning for a croissant and a café crème and a read  of L’Equipe, the daily French sports newspaper. All these things are part of France’s patrimony, like the Tour de France, and so it’s shocking to hear L’Equipe “diss” the Tour, particularly since the paper invented the race in 1903. It’s as if the barmaid were to tell you that croissants were nothing but “butter bombs”.

Yet every morning, on the inside pages, where L’Equipe’s articles about cycling are hidden nowadays, you find sentences like this one: “Since 1998 the Tours have been fraudulent, the results cooked up with the use of EPO, and nobody does anything.” When L’Equipe says so, you know drugs are killing cycling. The organisers are now desperately trying to save the Tour through measures like having it start in London next Saturday, but it’s too late. The world’s most mythical race has lost much of its public, possibly forever.