'I’m the cycling equivalent of the reserve goalkeeper for Plymouth Argyle' - How Dr Hutch explains why he's never ridden the Tour

Alex Dowsett once told me that one of the reasons he was grateful to finish the Tour de France in 2019 was that if someone - a taxi driver, say - heard that he was a pro cyclist and responded by asking him if he'd ridden the Tour, he could say, "Yes".

Alex rode in 2015 as well, but crashed out on Stage 12. He reckoned you needed to finish to claim membership of the "Giant of the Road" club of Tour riders.

When I am asked if I've ridden the Tour I obviously have to say "no". I usually try to soften the impact on their opinion of me by telling them some of the other things I've done and won. It never helps. No one believes there are enough bike riders in the world for there to be any half-decent ones left over after the Tour is full. If you haven't done the Tour, you're like a tennis player who's never played Wimbledon.

Like Wimbledon, the Tour sits in the Venn diagram overlap of "us" the cyclists (or tennis players), and "them" everyone else. We know what it is, how it represents the pinnacle of a huge sport. Everyone else thinks it's somewhere between the London Marathon and a gap year in Thailand.

Michael Hutchinson

Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author, Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week

I once had a literary agent whose website claimed I'd done the Tour, simply because it never occurred to them I might not have done. When the Tour started in Yorkshire in 2014, the local organisers got numerous "entries" from locals who fancied a go, or who wanted their grandkids to get a ride.

For years my standard response to this general conversation was to compare the Tour to the FIFA World Cup. "I'm more like the reserve goalkeeper for Plymouth Argyle," I'd say. Once, I said this on stage at an event and a woman in the third row put her hand up to say, "My grandson is the reserve goalkeeper for Plymouth Argyle." To this day I don't know if that was true, but I stopped saying it anyway for fear that one dark night, Plymouth Argyle and the reserve goalie's granny would come for me.

Because people think it's not a hard event to do, there are lots who fib about it. "I've done the amateur Tour de France," I heard as recently as last year. "My brother is away for the weekend - he's riding the Tour de France," was another one.

Often this is an innocent confusion with the Etape du Tour, which is a sportive event covering a single stage although it still says something about the status of cycling that someone sincerely believes that their brother took a weekend off from being an accountant to ride the Tour.

Sometimes, of course, it's deliberate deceit. I don't call people on this stuff, because what's the point? I do, however, ask a lot of questions, so you'll need to have your story straight: "Wow! What team did you ride for?"

"Um... what is it that you call them now... the London Dynamo?"

"I guess you were leading out Marcel Kittel in the sprints, then?"

"Um, yeah."

I have a different tack with taxi drivers since my conversation with Alex. If any of them ask, I explain about the Tour, about how elite it is. And I advise them always to ask a pro rider not just if they rode the Tour, but how often.

"You see," I say, "to be a true Giant of the Road, you need to have finished it at least twice. You should always call out anyone who's only finished it once. Tell them that that doesn't count."

I can only hope Alex meets one of these drivers eventually.