A gruelling search for the best smell at the world’s biggest bike race.
If I am to be polite about it, the Tour de France is an … aromatic place. There are many smells: dead foxes, the masculine urge to coat oneself with Axe body spray, the opposing masculine urge to not wear deodorant at all. The buses smell, and not pleasantly. The roadside smells. The public toilets smell. So rare is the moment that you smell something nice that it’s kinda revelatory when you do.
The scene: Saint-Méen-le Grand, a town which I’m sure has something going for it but which revealed none of those charms to me during my short time there. In an unlovely industrial zone on the edge of town, I had my first Tour de France caravan sighting of the Tour. It was riotous fun, as it always is: the Tourtel floats with their fake grass covering, the Cochonou sausage 2CVs, the E.Leclerc leek (oh, the leek). There’s joy in the familiar, but a new brand to the caravan, French pasta company Panzani, offered a genuine shock to the system. The reason? Drifting in the air around it was the unmistakable smell of pesto.
We did a dumb double-take like cartoon characters and confirmed with each other that we had smelt what we thought we had smelt and weren’t having a stroke or something. The caravan continued its passage, threading a needle between barriers and screaming spectators, and the pesto smell was soon replaced by the usual stink of armpits, but I was charmed. I needed to know how a promotional float could do this thing.
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