There’s a certain last day of school energy as the Tour de France has hit Nice. The race has almost reached its end, and after weeks in training camps and racing around a country, the riders are pretty amped to be done. With the Mediterranean glimmering next to the team buses, a sequence of partners and children arrive to meet their loved ones. At Uno-X, Søren Wærenskjold’s girlfriend eavesdrops on another TV2 interview. At Jayco-AlUla, Luke Durbridge lifts his child up in a warm embrace. At EF Education-Easypost, Neilson Powless’s wife and child are there to see dad in his adopted hometown. Ben Healy’s mum and dad walk up and he emerges for a hug. And then his partner Martha walks in with their dog, Olive, and the show is comprehensively stolen.
Olive is a little sausage dog, one year old and extensively floppy of ear and legs. Healy, after almost three weeks of racing, is obviously quite happy to see both her and Martha, and among the hubbub of the stage start he stood there a while, talking to his family and gently rubbing Olive’s enormous ears between his fingers.
I liked the cut of Olive’s jib – her confident strut, her mottled coat, her glacier-meltwater-eyes. We have met other dogs in our time at this race – intimidating bomb dogs included – but with Olive it felt only right to extend the Friendship Tour one last time to meet another 11/10, A++ doggo of the peloton.
Iain Treloar: I assume this is the famous Olive. How is she enjoying her Tour de France?
Martha (on behalf of Olive): This is her first ever bike race, actually.
IT: Woah. How’s she handling it?
M: She’s good, but every time Ben goes on the bus she starts crying.
IT: Aww, that’s sad. I noticed that when Ben came out he was stroking her leathery ears.
M: [laughs] Yeah.
IT: Is that a preferred soothing technique for Olive?
M: I mean, look at her ears! They’re gorgeous. I feel like everyone just goes to that…
IT: They’re quite long. Did she ever trip over them when she was a puppy?
M: No, but she did have quite large ears, actually, to be fair. Now you’ve pointed it out… She does look a bit like an elephant.
IT: Does she have other doggy friends of the pro scene?
M: Yeah, she does. There’s a lot of sausages in the Peloton. There’s so many.
IT: The Pidcocks…
M: Yeah, we have Acorn and Chestnut, and then we have Cookie, which is Alisa and Pavel [Sivakov]’s. Yeah, so she has friends.
IT: Are you guys based in Andorra?
M: Half the time.
IT: So, the champion dog of our hearts at last year’s Tour de France was Zoe. I don’t know if you know Zoe?
M; Yeah, Lisa and Adam Yates’ dog [an enormously cloudlike Samoyed]
IT: Now, I think that Olive brings a different ethos to the task.
M: Yeah.
IT: But I think she’s executing it quite well.
M: Yeah.
IT: Is she friends with Zoe?
M: No, she hasn’t met Zoe yet, actually. No, she’s never met Zoe.
IT: I like to imagine that they could be friends.
M: Yeah, I can see that. Olive’s quite a lot. She’s quite uh, energetic.
IT: What does she like doing?
M: Running after Ben. On the bike.
IT: She’s a runner? With all due respect to Olive, she doesn’t seem like she would be a natural runner…
M: She has some speed, yeah!
IT: Is she a barky dog?
M: No. No barks, she only cries.
[Olive begins trying to lift her little front legs up to start climbing the bus steps, putting her head under the curtain in search of Healy]
IT: And she’s never been on the team bus?
M: No.
IT: I think she wants to.
M: Well, yeah.
IT: And… she’s going in.
M: [laughs]
IT: Thank you for your time!
[Olive makes an increasingly desperate attempt to access the bus]
M: Olive, come on!!!
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