‘Why,’ asked a Labour friend of mine this week, ‘is Britain still run by people from Oxford and Cambridge? When is it going to stop?’

Social mobility in Great Britain is bad, and getting worse. The Economist itself has linked this to a highly differentiated education system. While there is an established negative relationship between social mobility and income inequality, it’s also interesting to look at historical and cultural explanations.

Only 7% of British students attend private schools, and those at the top of the political and social ladders are overwhelmingly drawn from an even smaller set of elite schools and a tiny number of ‘ancient’ universities. Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge, and all that.

Marxisant claims about the 1688 Glorious Revolution and the Civil Wars aside, England has never really experienced a political upheaval which has implied an overturning of established status traditions. As such, it differs greatly from both societies such as France with its culture of the republican equality of citizens, and somewhat similar cultural modes influenced by the American revolution, and its Antipodean settler offshoots – Australia and New Zealand. Early attempts to establish both a Church and to entrench pseudo-aristocratic status in New South Wales had collapsed as long ago as the 1830s. White Australia, if you like, was born modern.

So, in English culture, we see a more collectivist sociality riven by many fine distinctions of status – manifested by locality, accent, mannerisms, disposition and so much more. The English are a much more tribal people than some other English speaking cultures. The House of Lords may no longer be dominated by hereditary peers, but the sort of social formation which saw them survive long past their use by date endures.

A number of historians, including Martin Wiener, have pointed to an elitism of mediocrity, an overweening concern with status and social distinction as a contributor to British decline. To large degree, the Labour party’s projects of comprehensive education, Wilsonian technocratic modernism and Blairite modernisation were all responses to this.

But, how far do you go with meritocratic education? Educational opportunities for all, though very important for life chances and social mobility are only one piece of the puzzle. It’s the reproduction of status that itself needs to be attacked. In Australia, for instance, a genuine meritocracy would probably imply no private schools at all, no Churchies and Girls Grammars with their blazers and direct routes into the sandstone universities and the professions. Perhaps the failure of both liberal and social democratic efforts to ensure equality through education in Britain was a failure of not going far enough. What’s needed is a separation of educational excellence from social status and its symbols and networks. What’s needed is a distinction between educational excellence and social elites.

Despite all the blah about ‘Western values’, women in the West also have issues with compulsory sexualised visibility. The claim that this regulation of dress is somehow a feminist move is both ambiguous and problematic. I’ve rarely seen a better discussion of this than Liz Conor’s. Go read.

In the AFL, it’s the home-and-away matchup of the year. While there have been longer winning streaks in the league’s history, never before have two undefeated teams met in the fourteenth round of competition. Geelong is the benchmark team of the competition, winning a premiership in 2007, narrowly missing out in 2008, and hasn’t lost a game this year. St. Kilda’s season has been remarkable not only for its undefeated streak but the margins of its victories; its percentage of 177.5% is the kind of thing you expect to see in the Manangatang District League third-division competition, not the elite competition with its player draft and salary cap as balancing mechanisms.

The Championships will come to their climax at the renovated Wimbledon. While Lleyton Hewitt’s run has ended in the quarter-finals, the prospect of two more displays from the most elegant player of the modern era, Roger Federer, should be worth waiting up for.

But, unsurprisingly, my eyes will be on Monaco for the start of the three-week carnival of cycling that is the Tour de France. If the drama and intrigue during the race gets anywhere close to the pre-race fun and games we’ve had, it should be a cracker.

If you want a list of the favourites, you could try here – the short version is that Alberto Contador is the warm-to-hot favourite, Australia’s Cadel Evans is arguably next in line, and there’s an unusually large bunch of other riders with a realistic chance, including 2008 champion Carlos Sastre, to the Schleck Brothers, to the omnipresent Lance Armstrong. Throw in Giro winner Denis Menchov and Levi Leipheimer and it’s a pretty volatile mix. Cadel has had a last-minute piece of bad news, with a teammate suspended for taking EPO, and again he’ll probably be left without teammates on the hardest climbs of the Tour. But with Contador the marked man of this year’s tour, and with the Astana trio of Armstrong, Contador, and Leipheimer slugging it out against Saxo Bank’s Andy and Frank Schleck, (and possibly providing opportunities for Evans to let them do some of the work for him), he may just get away without needing them. Not to mention, of course, the question that’s been puzzling everyone since Armstrong announced his comeback – is there room for two egos the size of Armstrong’s and Contador’s in the one team?

Key stages to watch include the time trials – dull television, but often decisive. Of the mountain stages, the decisive ones have been deliberately placed at the back of the race this year, with the early stages through the Pyrenees designed to keep the main players together. Only Stage 7′s climb to the ski station at Andorra Arcalis stands much chance of breaking up the main contenders, not because it’s a particularly tough climb in itself, but it comes at the end of 224 kilometres of hilly terrain. While the Tourmalet climb on stage 9 will always be a brute, 70 kilometres of downhill roll to the stage finish will almost certainly bring the major contenders back together again. Several of the Alps stages, by contrast, are good chances for changes in the “general classification”, particularly stage 17, which has two short but very nasty climbs near the finish.

But, if it’s a close race this year, it will be decided at the end of Stage 19 on the slopes of the Mont Ventoux; geologically part of the Alps, it sits well apart from any other mountains of similar size. Its upper part is completely denuded of vegetation, leaving the riders to be buffeted by the mistral, adding an extra degree of difficulty to what is already an extremely long and steep climb.

Long and steep enough that the winner must inevitably be using drugs to get ahead of the pack? Hard to know. There are, undoubtedly, those who use drugs to gain a deliberate advantage in the professional peloton. There have been since the sport of professional cycling began, and the suspension of Thomas Dekker makes obvious that they’re still around. But, just maybe, the UCI’s new “biological passport” program may be making inroads on two fronts – reducing the numbers cheating, and reducing the scope for gaining advantage of those that do. There have been fewer fairytale rides like Floyd Landis’s effort in the 2006 Tour in the past couple of years. And the times on some of the major Tour climbs have actually been going back up a little over the past few years. So while it would be naive to think that drugs are going to play no part in deciding the results of the Tour this year, it’s reasonable to hope that they might have a bit less influence than the recent past.

As well as SBS’s excellent Cycling Central website (whose contributors include LP’s own Philip Gomes), you can get a first-person account of the race from the Twitter feeds of many cyclists, including Cadel Evans, Michael Rogers, and Lance Armstrong, though sadly not Simon Gerrans, who was inexplicably left off his team’s squad for the race.

Oh, and one last thing – the flat stages of the Tour are more than likely going to be the Mark Cavendish show. Cavendish is a delightfully profane character from the Isle of Man who is probably the worst climber and time triallist in the Tour field. But after getting an aerodynamic tow to near the line by Australian “lead-out rider” Mark Renshaw, Cavendish is currently the fastest cyclist alive over the last 200 metres of a stage. But watch for Thor Hushovd, Allan Davis, and Oscar Freire trying to disprove that!

The really short version is that I completed 536 kilometres of the 570 promised, with the missing kilometres the result of a mechanical failure that I couldn’t repair on the road towards the end of my second day’s riding (in short, a wheel that was unsafe to ride on, and Qantas’s cruel excess baggage policy meant that the spare wheelset was at home rather than in the car where it should have been).

But in any case, I did climb the Col du Tourmalet on my third day, and did it in one hour, 34 minutes and 30 seconds. While it’s way off the pros, it’s 12 minutes better than this guy from the New York Times, who did it fresh.

The tale of the three days riding in the Pyrenees will take multiple posts, which I will do at my own revived blog over the next few days – hopefully with photos, which remain on the support crew’s computer at the moment. It was, by far, the hardest physical challenge that I’ve ever undertaken. The pain of a bout of Crohn’s disease is worse, mind you, but this was self-inflicted. The views were spectacular (you’ll have to trust me until I can get the photos, but they really, really were!), the people were mostly wonderful, even the gendarmerie when they dragged us off the freeway when we were (unknown to us) riding on it illegally, the countryside was beyond fascinating. From a cycling perspective, one of the more interesting things was just how narrow so many of the famous roads up the cols are – they’re narrower than most of the farm access tracks near my boyhood home in Victoria’s north-east. The D918, the road on the Col du Tourmalet, is a glorified cart track despite the ski resort and considerable traffic on the road. Andorran drivers were the only ones with an Australian driver’s attitude to cyclists; in Spain and France they were all exceedingly helpful.

So what did I learn? While the absolute speeds were so different as to be a ridiculous comparison, I think I’ve got some idea what it’s like to push one’s body to the absolute limit for hour upon hour, through stinking heat and sun. While talented writers can instil a great deal of romance in the process, the fact is that on the bike it just feels like hour after hour of pain and discomfort. It just bloody well hurts, ok? But I’m very glad I did it, and I love cycling even more now than I ever did. As to the Tourmalet and the other famous climbs of the Tour, they too are perhaps romanticized overly. The laws of physics and physiology apply there, just as much as they do up a hill in Australia; I was pretty much dead-on with my expectations for the time I’d take. What makes those mountains special is that they provide the battleground for some of the greatest endurance athletes on Earth; no more, no less. How Cadel, our project patron Simon Gerrans, and the other pro cyclists do what they do remains a mystery. Do they hurt in the same way I did? More? I’ll never know, but I’ve gotten enough of a glimpse that my appreciation for what they do is even deeper than it was before. And while I don’t condone it, I can understand why the temptation for artificial assistance is so strong in pro ranks.

My fellow Crusaders, Damian, Dale, and Marieke, continue their even more difficult quest to ride the whole Tour route to raise awareness and money for Crohn’s disease. The support crew, John, Nancy, Tara and Jason were incredibly helpful, not to mention tolerant of tired, cranky cyclists. I couldn’t have done it without all of them.

Anyway, here’s the nag. To remind you all, Damian and I suffer from Crohn’s disease, and we all did this (aside from the personal gratification, of course) to raise the profile and some money for research into the condition. If any of you would be prepared to donate through the website, it would be very, very much appreciated. All monies raised go to Crohn’s and Colitis Australia to support research into what I still maintain is a neglected disease.