The thing you need to understand about the French police is that they can be quite scary people. There are a few varieties – some of them are in lowly pale blue polo shirts and tell you that a road is closed, and some of them are in black outfits with bulletproof vests and tactical pockets and gloves with carbon fibre knuckles for the times they really need to gently bend the will of the troubled souls they encounter.
This type are especially terrifying, not just because of their stony disposition but also the fact that they patrol the start area with bulletproof vests and semi-automatic weapons, supplementary to the pistols they have strapped around their legs. The unspoken rule of the Tour de France – heck, probably continued existence in French society – is to politely walk past them giving ample space for their enormous biceps to swing by, without making any eye contact whatsoever.
At the stage start in Pau, however, everything changed.
The scene: outside the EF Education-EasyPost bus. A cluster of six or seven of them, one of them holding the lead of a big black and mottled-brown dog. I read a badge on the shoulder of the dog’s handler. Gendarmerie détection explosifs (bomb squad), it says. These are people with an important task to do and no time for our inane bullshit. But somewhere deep down in their big brawny hearts lurked a soft spot. How do we know this? Because one of them knocked over a small boy.
The child, at the time we came across this little human moment, had wiped away his tears as his dad hovered nearby. One of the big policemen kneeled on one knee, had the other knee up, and the boy sat on his big strong leg. Another big policeman poured a bottle of Vittel on the knee of the boy, washing away the blood onto the tarmac. A third gendarme prepared a band-aid for application. A fourth big policeman stood, facing away from the scene, kinda guarding it, huge rifle at the ready.
As a general rule, my Friendship Tour does not extend to the scary type of police (the other ones are absolutely fair game). But there was something in this moment of tenderness that seemed to puncture the impermeability of law enforcement. Photographer Jered Gruber hovered around the scene, taking the much nicer pictures you see in this article instead of the shitty one I took on my phone (below). There were smiles instead of scowls.
The big scary black dog looked a bit less scary, standing there, mouth open and tongue lolling. “Can I take a picture?” I ask. The dog handler gets the dog to sit. He does, like a good boy. I ask what his name is. Shadow, we’re told. Good name. Great name, even. The handler clicks his fingers near my phone to get him to look in the right direction. Dogs don’t really smile but there’s definitely something smile-adjacent going on with Shadow’s face, I think, or maybe I’m just at that point of mid-Tour delirium where I’m anthropomorphising bomb squad dogs.
“And is Shadow trained to kill?” I ask, kinda jokey. The police officer nods. “Yes,” he confirms. Another policeman standing next to us interjects. “To kill you,” he says. We laugh. He cracks a smile. He’s joking. I think.
What did you think of this story?