Something occurred to me when reading Ned Boulting’s latest book: it was possible that ITV’s long-serving commentator and reporter has never watched the Tour de France on television. So I put it to him.
“I have never… watched… the Tour de France,” confirms Boulting, haltingly – seemingly as curious as me about whether it could possibly be true. With 22 Tours behind him, few on the planet have been as close to the race, yet it is correct that he's never sat down to watch it at home.
His lack of sofa-side experience is explained by his (now well-told) entry into the sport. His debut covering the race came in 2003 when he was despatched, grudgingly, to France by ITV bosses to be their roving TV reporter, with scant knowledge of the sport.
Most memorably, in that 2003 edition, he did a piece to camera during the opening prologue where he suggested David Millar had blown his chances of winning the “yellow jumper”.
Before 2003, he could have written everything he knew about the sport on the back of a postage stamp. "2002’s race? Didn’t see any of it. Wouldn’t have even known what channel it was on,” he says now.
But next year, 23 years after his crash landing into the Tour de France, he may finally see the race in the way most of us do.
At the end of last year, news broke that ITV – his July employer for the previous 22 editions of the Tour de France – had ceded the rights to broadcast the race in the UK from 2026.
For fans, it means live coverage of the race will disappear from free-to-air TV in the UK.
For a freelancer such as Boulting, it wasn’t just losing a job – it was losing the job, the one that brought him into the sport, that seeped into his soul and is such a huge part of his identity.
It’s only three weeks of his year, but the Tour strides like a colossus over the years of everyone involved in it.
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One last job
So, this July’s Tour will be Boulting's last, at least with ITV. “The end is coming hard and it’s coming fast,” he says, speaking to us over Zoom between commentating at June’s Criterium du Dauphine – also his last for ITV.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years. I’m certainly not going to stop commentating – I do a lot of work away from ITV… but this long, rich and very public association with ITV and the Tour de France is over.
“It finishes this summer when this thing that’s been the cornerstone of my entire experience with cycling comes emphatically to a close.
“All good things come to an end and my god; it’s been nearly a quarter of a century. I totally accept these things are finite but it’s going to be profoundly painful.”
Boulting is speaking to me with his author’s hat on. Besides his commentary work, he’s one of the most prolific writers of books in the cycling business and has another out on 19 June.
If his first cycling book, 2011’s How I Won the Yellow Jumper, chronicled his first eye-opening years in the sport with a newcomer’s untrammelled exuberance, this summer’s The Accidental Tour-ist: (Final) Dispatches from the Road is a more mature, reflective (and in Boulting’s view better-written) affair, bringing readers up-to-date on the years since.
“‘Yellow Jumper’ struck a chord with this tidal wave of interest in the sport, in the UK specifically, in between [Mark] Cavendish starting to win and [Bradley] Wiggins topping it off in 2012,” says Boulting.
“It was a period where so many people were discovering the sport for the first time in their lives in this country. My story being one of an outsider going on a very particular journey I think just struck a chord with people. It was an abnormally and weirdly successful publication in terms of book sales.”
18 months ago, he realised how much time had passed since its publication, how much cycling and his place within it had changed. This is the result, and while the idea was born before he knew ITV was withdrawing from cycling, it’s neat timing.
When does he think the emotion of this ‘one last job’ will hit him? “Even being asked that question I get a lump in my throat. I can’t begin to describe what this race means to me," he replies.
“One of the most thrilling moments of any Tour happens before stage 1 has even started. We come on air, we set the scene… before the start of the neutralised rollout on stage 1, you suddenly get live helicopter images of the peloton lining up and you know the race is about to start.
“The Tour de France peloton blows the doors of every other peloton in the world. All the best sprinters are there, all the best GC [general classification] riders.
“And you just go, ‘Christ, look at that!’ Everyone is there, as equals, nobody has gained, or lost time. Nobody has scored any green jersey points, nobody has crashed, or is injured.
“Everyone is on nought seconds – it’s all up for grabs – all this potential is brewing in this body of humanity. That’s before the race has even started!
“Even in a normal edition that wasn’t my last ever, as a commentator, that’s one of my most thrilling moments, so I can’t see beyond that one, let alone three weeks down the line.”
I tell him I’ll be crossing my fingers that he holds it together.
“I might not," he admits.
“It’s about the race, it’s not about me, but I am a human being, I do have feelings and I will do my damndest to hold it together.”
Edge of absurdity
21 consecutive Julys (and one October in the pandemic year of 2020) spent at the Tour is a good run for anyone and it can’t be just for contractual reasons that people such as Boulting give so much of their working lives over to it.
There are two sides to the appeal, he says: the narrative of the race and what happens on “the road” as he calls it.
In the race, he says, “something will happen in those three weeks that’s never happened before, like when the Orica-Greenedge bus got stuck on the finish line [2013], or the gendarmes hit the peloton with pepper spray [2018], or a landslide stopping the race [2019].
“I love that it’s completely uncontrollable, teetering on the edge of absurdity the whole time, and that every now and then it crosses the line into chaos.”
He marvels at the sheer scale of the event, of losing track of days in the washing machine of the Tour.
“I love the variability baked into the Tour. One day you can end up staying six hours in a chateau, because you arrived at midnight and you have to leave at breakfast, but it is still the most beautiful place you’ve ever stayed in your life.
“And the next day you might be in a pit on an industrial estate on the outskirts of somewhere unremarkable, like Macon.
“You have to roll with the blows, because you can’t let your excitement or disappointment of how each day plays out overwhelm you. You fall into this punch-drunk state, where you let events lap over you because there’s no other way of dealing with it.”
Another thing that keeps him coming back is what he describes in the book as cycling’s “wildly, charmingly homespun” feel. His love of cycling grew at the same time as he lost interest in football, a sport now so big at the top level that it has an unreal air about it, with players in a bubble detached from supporters.
There are no tickets, or turnstiles in cycling, it’s not going to be shut off for 200km on open roads, says Boulting, as a way of explaining this. The riders train on open roads and have a “direct connection with reality”.
“Take Remco Evenepoel, a superstar of this sport, who could have had his whole career [derailed] because a Belgian postal worker opened her car door on him while he was out training. How real is that?”
Elsewhere in the new book, he recalls a conversation with a colleague a few years ago in which he told them to “never underestimate what a small sport cycling is in [the UK]”. Is he concerned that a small sport is about to get smaller, in the wake of it disappearing from terrestrial TV?
“We’ll have to see how it plays out. It’s hard to construct an argument… that it’s a positive move that’s going to broaden its appeal. But equally, let’s wait to see the evidence.”
He says he’s had a number of riders from what he calls “the Pidcock generation” – loosely those British riders who’ve come of age recently having watched as impressionable kids while Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France – tell him that the reason that they got into the sport was because they sat down to watch the ITV Tour de France highlights at 7pm.
“A summer ritual passed down through the generations – that curious introduction to the sport that has been removed from the pipeline.”
The best of all time?
So, one last job awaits this summer for Boulting, at least in his ITV guise. It couldn’t be more tantalisingly poised, with Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard – and Remco Evenepoel coming up fast on the outside – set to battle on equal footing and answer the question: who is the better Tour de France rider?
“Hopefully we’ll see for the first time a proper head-to-head and get an answer – at the moment, I don’t have one. Anyone who suggests they know the answer is lying through their teeth.
“Maybe Remco isn’t in that conversation yet?
“You can argue cogent cases for both these great riders [Pogacar and Vingegaard]. But bring it on. Because we’re watching Coppi-Bartali here. No, I’ll say it – it’s my last Tour de France for television – I think we’re watching the greatest rivalry in the history of the Tour de France playing out in real time before our eyes."
Ned Boulting's Tour de France highlights
Favourite Tour de France moment
“The stage 20 time trial in 2020, on La Planche des Belles Filles [between Roglic and Pogacar]. I’d never seen a stage 20 reversal on GC and I didn’t see this coming. And to have the honour to try and find the words for the moment…”
Favourite place to stay at the Tour
“Anywhere that isn’t the Alps. Humanity has ruined it. Give me the Pyrenees any time. I love spending a night in Pau, too."
The rider you'd bring out of retirement tomorrow
“Robbie McEwen was one of the earliest riders I came across and was such an interesting man to interview. I like his style too on the road, he never had a leadout train and would jump around during the sprint.”
Toughest interviewee
“Steve Cummings. He had a habit – and I like Steve, we’re good mates – but as a rider, he’d have this strange habit, where the answers to questions would suddenly stop when you least…” [tails off]
"Obviously, Lance Armstrong was the most difficult, but also the most interesting, because of the whole dynamic. The ‘you know that I know that you know that I know’ but we’re not going to say it.
"He was the only rider I’d heard of in 2003. I didn’t know he was doping but it took me a week of asking around to have serious doubts about his performances. Certainly, by the time I came back for my second Tour, it was blindingly obvious what was going on.
"But what could you say on air without being taken off air by the lawyers?"
Did it help to not know much about him when you started?
"I think so. 2003 was his fifth victory. I think a lot of the cycling media was cowed and in awe of him, and frankly terrified. Whereas I’d come from football, interviewing big names, live on TV to audiences of 20m.
"Alex Ferguson in the tunnel after a defeat in the Champions League is not the easiest thing to do. So, I wasn’t cowed or in awe of Lance Armstrong, or terrified of him. I didn’t understand how big he was to be honest.
"My naivety helped. Weirdly, I think he quite respected that, he liked the challenge."
The best thing about the Tour
"One of single biggest joys is reaching Paris late at night on the evening of stage 20, which is why I’m so glad we’re going back there this year [2024 finished in Nice].
"It’s dark and you catch a first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. That moment of completion, where you understand this journey has come to an end, is indescribably powerful."
And the worst…
"Cumulative fatigue. The older I get, the harder it gets to deal with, sometimes you have to prop your eyes open with matches because staring at a screen is really debilitating. There’s the intensity too.
"Until you start commentating on a bike race, you realise you’ve never properly watched it, that you just let it drift over you. Commentating takes a real physical toll on you."
The Accidental Tour-ist: (Final) Dispatches from the Road by Ned Boulting is out now in hardback (Bloomsbury Sport, £20)
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