At Tour de France stage starts and finishes – or, well, anywhere that a team staffer pauses for a moment – a plaintive cry goes up. It goes like this: “Bidon, s’il vous plait?” – a bottle, please? – and it’s uttered by hundreds of imploring children every day. It’s one of the great certainties of a major bike race that fans are desperately on the hunt for such a memento: a touchpoint with the lips of their heroes, a 500 ml plastic container of dreams.
I had always had an awareness of this being a thing, but at the 2024 Tour de France Hommes the crushing scale of the need, and the impossibility to meet its demand, was made more clear than ever.
The scene: Villeneuve-sur-Lot, on the way back from a sweaty finish line to a sweaty press-room, talking to two members of EF Education-EasyPost’s ever-charismatic media team. One of them – Johannes – was midway through a colourful retelling of how they had been swindled by a member of the Tour de France promotional caravan: she’d bartered a yellow TdF t-shirt in exchange for an EF bottle, he’d begrudgingly handed one over, and she’d skipped off merrily without completing her side of the exchange. Scandal.
In the midst of this dramatic retelling, a boy in his teens appeared at the fringes of our conversation, begging for a bottle of his own. Johannes slipped into French to express his apologies, explained they had no more, and the teen left disappointed. “Does that happen a lot?” I asked. Him: “You have no idea.” Which sparked an idea. “Hey… would you mind keeping a tally of how many times it happens and I’ll check in on you tomorrow?” I asked. Johannes and Sarah were tolerant enough of my dumb side-quest to agree, and we parted ways.
The next day, I bumped into Johannes and Sarah at a couple of points. 30, they’d update me. Then 35. The final tally came in Pau on the morning of stage 14, accounting for the folks lurking around the hotel the previous night: 40 in total, for those two members of the EF squad travelling in a car together. But here’s the thing: there are many more cars, many more staff members, and many more teams. The multiplied tally was mind-boggling, and with it came (probably apocryphal) whispers of organised gangs holding babies aloft or pushing children forward as a sympathy ploy to gather more bottles, reselling them on the roadsides of Europe from vans.
I had a good data-point from EF – a great one, even – but clearly, this was just the tip of the iceberg. And what of the bottle tallies for other teams? What did that reveal about their relative popularity, and the temperaments of the staff that held the fates of those bottles in their hands?
Over the next few days, I sidled up to many of the more obliging teams and asked them, with my best impersonation of a yearning French child, how many “bidon, s’il-vous-plait”s they got daily. It was important, I learned, to do the impersonation – hands outstretched in a floppy-wristed prayer – as a way of differentiating this specific request from the hundreds of roadside signs asking the same, or the people yelling it at riders – or grabbing at bottles from cages – as they went past.
Lidl-Trek, riding the new Madone with special integrated bottle cages, had the ideal solution to this particular problem: their bottles were not round, so they were A) not easily replaceable and B) therefore the perfect excuse for not giving them away. Nonetheless, their press officer – Not-From-Glasgow-Amy – estimated the tally at 50 requests per person per day, most of them unfulfilled. Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s press officer Stephanie – a very nice Australian who wants you to watch her Tiktok of the team bus – was also in the conversational trust-tree at the time and immediately one-upped Amy’s response by claiming Red Bull’s request tally was “countless.” [She also confirmed that Red Bull is actually in the cans of Red Bull that the riders drink, rather than branded sparkling water or whatever, which busted my conspiracy theory wide open.]
I continued down the buses of whatever town we were in. Soudal-Quick Step’s press officer claimed that he personally fended off “six or seven” requests a day; his counterpart at Lotto-Dstny couldn’t get more specific than a knowing eyeroll and an “oh, lots,” but did reveal herself to be a better person than me by being completely mystified when I asked if there was a certain dark pleasure to be found in denying bottles again and again. “But that is of course sad,” she said. “Why would it make me happy to turn the children down?” Uno-X Mobility, perhaps wary of a similar line of enquiry – or because they’d realised that I was the Kristoff Cake Guy and it was guaranteed to be a waste of time – declined to respond over WhatsApp.
A mountaintop finish a few days later; I can’t remember which one. Two Business Friendly Bahrain staff members busied themselves around a team car as a teen on a Razor scooter waited to pounce. After he’d been denied I wandered over to the staffers and explained that I had a Very Important Question: how often does that happen to you guys? “At least 50 times a day,” they said, after a brief dialogue to determine how much it was sensible to reveal, mostly because they were worried about whether I was going to spin some story about the environmental harm of these bottles not being reused. It’s not that kind of story, I said, and I meant it: the Elite bottles used by most of the peloton are biodegradable anyway, which explains why they are A) not turtle-killers and B) also why they warp infuriatingly out of shape if you put them through the dishwasher or travel with them on a plane. These are the trade-offs we make for our marine friends.
DSM Firmenich-PostNL’s press officer, a day or so later, volunteered to go on a bottle-counting side-quest for me, but promptly forgot about it: “about 50,” she estimated the next time our paths crossed. I resisted the temptation to bother Ineos Grenadiers when we were staying at the same shitty hotel – partially because the team’s vibe was awful, partially because they were riddled with COVID – but a few days later confirmed that their count was “30-40” a day. One of their staff let slip that I should talk to one of the “really big teams” because they probably got a lot more requests. How the mighty have fallen.
In light of Ronan’s big Carbon Monoxide Adventure, approaching the new top tier of the Tour was a harder task than it might otherwise have been – a fact confirmed by a slightly salty UAE press officer’s response via WhatsApp that there were “hundreds of [bottle] requests a day per staff member, probably [running] into the millions over the course of the Tour,” and that “we don’t have that many bidons.” [I was too much of a coward to try my luck with Visma-Lease a Bike (although happily they were normal with us again by Tour’s end)].
I completed my assignment with a WhatsApp request to my new friends at Total Energies. “I don’t know exactly but one or two fans ask us a bottle!” their English-speaking press officer told me. “We also see next to the road « my grandmother against a bottle »,” he continued, which I think means that, via Google Translate, people are offering to trade their elderly relatives for a drink bottle that a rider has recently slobbered all over.
“People are crazy,” my TotalEnergies friend concluded. After delving into the darkest depths of the bottle request game at the Tour de France – from the teams getting one or two requests all the way up to those getting “countless” or “millions” of them – I couldn’t help but find myself agreeing with him.
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