LnR 064 The Tour de France

This podcast is all about the Tour de France bike race. I give you some cycling vocabulary and then there's a short dialogue. I talk about the bike race and vocabulary for the first ten minutes, so if you hate cycling, you can go to the dialogue directly at about 10:00 minutes. Here are some cycling words: 1) In French: peleton, domestique, maillot jaune, chapeau, jour sans, lanterne rouge; 2) In Italian: polemica, riding piano; 3) In English: tactical nous, stage race, one-day race, Grand Tour. I also use the words "penultimate day" and "polka dots".

A: What are you watching?

B: It's the Tour de France bike race.

A: Where is it?

B: It's in France! Where did you think it was?!

A: Give me a break! I didn't understand what you said!

B: OK, sorry. But it's the most famous stage race in the world. I thought you'd heard of it.

A: I'm not into cycling. I like basketball. Who's that? Why is he wearing a yellow shirt?

B: That's Chris Froome. The yellow jersey means he's leading the race. The guy in the green jersey is Peter Sagan. He's a great sprinter and a consistent top five finisher except for the mountain stages.

A: What about the guy in the red and white polka dots?

B: He's wearing the polka dot jersey for best climber. Look at that teammate giving him a water bottle. He's called a domestique. Each team has several domestiques whose job is to help their leaders. This one just came back from his team car with some water bottles.

A: How long is the race?

B: It's 21 days. It finishes on Sunday afternoon in downtown Paris.

A: Twenty-one days! That's incredible!