Today was our third live Tour de France. Our first was way back in Ireland in 1998, but that wasn’t the proper Tour. We went to cheer on Chris Boardman but he had fallen off down the road at Dungarvan. And there were just the cyclists, not the publicity caravan. Going to the Tour is all about the freebies, as we found out on our second Tour, last year. It passed very close so we were able to cycle the 12 or so km to Chatelus Malvaleix to take in the experience. This year it was about a 20km journey to pick up the Tour at L’Embranchement in Indre. Owing to bad weather we took the car most of the way but walked the last few kilometres, a wise congestion-avoiding move.

I always used to think that the Tour was an environmentally friendly sort of event, but now I’m not so sure. As you sit and wait for the caravan, there’s a constant stream of vehicles – motorbikes, vans and cars. Some of these are gendarmes, some are race officials and some are media – but who the rest are is anyone’s guess. Then comes the caravan with its fleet of strange transport. There’s a giant cyclist with a yellow jersey, huge horses on the roof of a car, tyres that drive down the road by themselves, a six-pack of Panaché, the Vittel water truck hosing the spectators down – it’s brilliant. You wave and cheer and hope to get a plastic-wrapped free gift of some sort. You have to be alert, the goodies arrive at high speed, thrown from quite a height and some of them are fairly chunky. A pack of cards bounced off my shin last year, and a packet of Haribo sweeties got me in the shoulder this year. But no pain, no gain, as they say! The freebies are generally very useful, such as hats, bags, keyrings, fridge magnets, free samples of foods, and lanyards, so not too much frivolous waste of the earth’s resources there. There are a few not-so-biodegradable items like the huge PMU hands, but in our household we’ll reuse those until they fall apart. And then comes another barrage of vehicles. Team cars start appearing, and more gendarmes. They ask you to step back onto the side of the road, which everybody does, but as soon as they’ve gone, everyone steps right back out again. Crazy. The media presence builds up with radio cars and motorcycle cameramen, and then the biggest gas guzzlers of them all appear, swooping from the sky. The helicopters! Some of them brush the treetops as they thunder by in convoy, half a dozen or so at least. You can feel the earth warming up a fraction of a degree.

And finally the cyclists arrive. All the waiting, and it’s over in seconds. It’s hard to pick out individuals – you’re just aware of a brightly coloured tornado sweeping past. Blink and you’ll miss it. But it’s so exciting! Then the last collection of team cars and gendarmes streams by, with the broom wagon at the end. A few more gendarmes and it’s all over.

When you think about it, any big sporting event brings a cloud of pollution in its wake, and very probably the Tour is better than most. The main competitors are powering themselves, no special premises have been built for them, and the spectators tend to go to the nearest point to see their heroes so aren’t travelling huge distances to get there. A good percentage cycle – now that doesn’t happen when people go to Silverstone or Ascot. The cyclists may jettison their plastic water bottles, but there’s no littering as these are quickly seized by spectators as souvenirs. Any official signs tend to disappear quickly too, so there’s hardly any trace left that the Tour has been by. Vive le Tour! It may not be as green as it used to be, back when there were no support vehicles and cyclists mended their own punctures or bent their own battered front forks into shape after a crash. But it’s massively entertaining as well as being the most incredible sporting event in the world and I for one hope it will go on forever.