THIS Saturday the 2015 edition of the Tour de France sets out from Utrecht. Without being unduly rude to the Dutch this is a city that perhaps most of us don’t think of first when listing places to visit in Holland. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, the Hague, perhaps, but Utrecht?

This is the fifth time Le Tour has started in Holland, including the very first Grand Départ to take place outside of France, Amsterdam in 1954. Scheveningen in 1973, Leiden 1978, s-Hertogenbosch 1996 and Amsterdam again most recently in 2010. That’s a pretty good spread over the course of six decades, indicative of the decentralisation of Le Tour, one of its most attractive characteristics, trans-European and devolved in terms of its start and routes, with the only geographical constant the final sprint finish down the Champs-Élysées at the end.

The closest road cycling has to a social history is Tim Hilton’s book One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers. Sadly now out of print, Hilton’s book tells the story of cycling via his childhood and adolescence growing up in a communist family, or what we used to call “a party family.”

Cycling is a working-class recreation, a means to escape the city, a socialised form of recreation, competitive for those who want to race and leisure for most who don’t. That unhelpful binary opposition, competition v participation, is subverted to everybody’s benefit. There can’t be too many books on cycling which feature entries for the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in the index, but why not? As Tim writes about his memories of the 1950s: “The PCF understood the mass appeal of cycling and was always eager to make alliances between cycle sport and the communist movement.”

It is the kind of endeavour that flies in the face of reactionary common sense ideas about sport, hence the sporting establishment mantra “keep politics out of sport.” Unfortunately with precious few exceptions, the fast-improving sports pages of the Morning Star certainly being one, a common sense proposition that too often meets its mirror opposite on the left, “keep sport out of our politics.”

It was the great Marxist CLR James who wrote “what do they know of cricket who only cricket know.” The self-same observation could, and should, be made of cycling and indeed every other sport too. There is certainly an upsurge of both popular interest and participation in cycling. For many this is a version of a middle-class mid-life crisis, aka the midlifecyclist (sic). The sports writer Richard Williams recently wrote about this phenomenon in terms of golf’s decline and the parallel rise of competitive road cycling.

“Instead of dropping a few grand on a country club subscription and a set of Wilson irons and TaylorMade woods, a young investment banker or hedge fund manager is now more likely to spend the cash on a Campagnolo-equipped carbon-fibre frame from Cervelo or Colnago. “The couple of hundred quid that once went on a new driver is spent shaving a few grams with a pair of ultra-lightweight aerodynamic bottle cages.”

This is a stylised consumption of sport few readers of the Morning Star will have either the means to follow or have much sympathy for. But the point should be to engage with an understanding of the social construction of sport. The growth of cycling in that sense apes the running boom of the mid 1980s, the golden days of Coe, Ovett and Cram. 

This was accompanied by the growth of huge city centre marathons while almost every small town, villages even would boast a fun run. Meanwhile the late, and certainly not great, Jimmy Savile was on prime-time BBC chomping on his cigar while making the popular link between physical exercise and reducing the risk of heart disease. If Jimmy could run a marathon surely anybody could? Worldwide Jim Fixx’s books on running became global best sellers. Pretty soon it seemed as if almost everybody was a jogger.

Except they weren’t, were they? Running remains the most basic of all sports so it has the potential to reach a bigger and broader audience to draw participants from than many other sports. But to develop any kind of decent level of fitness requires both the time to train, access to pleasurable and safe routes and for many, at a minimum, informal coaching and advice for motivation and guidance. All three are socially constructed, much less so than say rowing, equestrianism and yachting, our most successful Olympic sports (which tells us a lot about Team GB and the governance of elite British Olympic sport), but nevertheless shaped by class relations.

Such a perspective of course should not disqualify our enjoyment of Le Tour as it unfolds over the next few weeks across the roads and mountains of Holland, Belgium and France (well not mountains in the Low Countries, obviously!).

But it most certainly should inform any vision of human liberation, one in which what we do for leisure should play a vital part. What other sport can you partake in as a means of getting to work, college or to a meeting? One you can do on your own, as a family with the kids or as a social group? A sport where eating and drinking is a vital part of how it is consumed?

Is carbon-free while being fashionably continental? These are the core elements for the basis of a progressive, participative cycling culture.And Utrecht? A year after Le Tour has departed it is set to enter the record books with the world’s biggest railway station storage facility for bicycles. A three storey cycle park to accommodate an astonishing 12,500 bikes. It’s the kind of bold venture that cycling for all, not for the few, needs. Cycling our roads to socialism, or in the spirit of Le Tour’s homeland, Liberté, Égalité, Vélocité.

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