Still, there are a few things you see in person on an Alpine climb that you miss on the TV. Il Diablo, perhaps the Tour’s most famous spectator for his appearances in a devil costume, is sponsored by a biodiesel company. There’s the loot from the sponsors’ caravan; I missed out on a Caisse De Stepargne jersey, but snaffled a Carrefour polka-dot cap, a bottle opener, and a bag. The thousands of amateur cyclists of varying abilities who ride up in the morning to get a viewing spot provide a great reality check; the pros look similarly pained on the steeper parts; the difference is that they’re going at least twice as fast. And you get to see the bits of road graffiti that the TV crew edits out – my favourite was “Trek bikes for sale – call Lance” (context here). But best of all, you get to chat to a huge variety of fellow fans, from the Dutch guys in motorhomes to the hundreds of Aussies on organized tours.

As for the race itself, it’s shaping up as an interesting contest. While we still don’t know who’s going to win the Tour, the first real mountains have eliminated a few pre-race favourites. Lance Armstrong’s pissed-off expression as he passed me, minutes behind the race leaders, said it all. Bradley Wiggins’ race is also likely run (to the surprise of noone but a few over-enthusiastic British fans). But, beyond that, the last kilometres of the day’s stage have called into question the pre-race assumption that it was Alberto Contador’s tour to lose.

For the past two years, Contador has been the world’s best Grand Tour rider by a considerable margin. Grand Tours are decided in two types of stages – mountainous ones, and individual time trials. Like Armstrong at his peak, he was both the best climber in the field, and amongst the very best time trialists. But, in the last kilometer of yesterday’s Alpine stage, Andy Schleck scampered away with Samuel Sanchez (a chance for the podium, but not amongst the top favourites) to win the stage from a group containing virtually every other GC (overall) contender. The time gain was a fairly inconsequential ten seconds. But will he be able to do so again – and gain enough time on Contador and the other GC contenders? He’ll need it.

And what of the other contenders? Not least, what of the current yellow jersey holder, Australia’s own Cadel Evans? He’s made it through the lucky dip of the first week with a few bonus seconds, and stayed with the other contenders on the first mountain top finish. Will he have the climbing legs to stick with Schleck, Contador and the others on the Col de Madelaine tonight (Aussie time)? And, even if he does, will the accumulated fatigue from the Giro d’Italia (which most of Evans’ rivals did not race) catch up with him, perhaps on my favourite Tour climb, the Col du Tourmalet, next weekend?

We’ll just have to wait. Like a Test series, watching the Tour requires patience. But if you stay up for it, there’ll be ample gorgeous helicopter shots of the French countryside to fill the time.

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!

Lance Armstrong is a rider who was (and may still be) perfectly suited to the Tour de France. He excels in two disciplines. He was exceptional at long time trials, an individual race against the clock, and mountain climbing – particularly the extremely long but not ultra-steep climbs of the Tour. The overall winner of the Tour de France must be amongst the best in both of these disciplines. Armstrong trained exclusively for the Tour, practising the climbs and the time trial courses again and again until he knew them perfectly. And he had a team featuring many of the best riders in the field, who rode not for their own glory but purely to support Armstrong.

In other races – indeed, in flatter stages on the Tour – Armstrong just rode with the bunch; his particular gifts didn’t help him when the road was flat and he’s riding with other cyclists. Indeed, for many one-day races, he acted as water bottle-fetcher – domestique – for his teammates. Throughout the period where he won the Tour, the only other races of note that he won were the Dauphine Libere – a traditional Tour warm-up featuring a mountainous course, and the Tour de Georgia – the closest thing he had to a home race, one featuring a couple of challenging climbs, and one in which he might be expected to put in a particular effort.

The Tour Down Under features many things, but high mountains aren’t one of them. The biggest climb is the Willunga Hill – a total ascent of only 227 metres at the moderate gradient of 7.6%. It’s a nice little hill, but hardly the kind of behemoth on which Armstrong breaks his rivals. And there’s no individual time trial, either. Most of the stages will come down to a bunch sprint, at which Armstrong is positively pedestrian at compared to sprinters like Robbie McEwen.

The Tour will be Armstrong’s first race in three years. It’s on a type of course in which, even at his peak, he didn’t win on. And, frankly, there’s not much incentive for him to bust a gut trying; over-exerting in the South Australian heat at this time of year might throw his training schedule out of whack. At most, he might have a crack on the Willunga Hill stage, but possibly not even that.

This is the equivalent of Tiger Woods in Australia for a pre-season practice round after a long layoff. Or Shane Warne playing a charity match on a green wicket that won’t turn. He’ll sign autographs, attend dinners, and ride around in the bunch. Yes, it’s interesting, but let’s not treat it more seriously than it deserves.