My hope, and I just wish my knowledge of French was strong enough to bear it out: is that the French tradition of sports writing is as lyrical and sympathetic to cycling as the equivalent American tradition is to baseball.

I've never played baseball, never even held a baseball bat (although I did wear a pitcher's mitt once. I can't remember how or why, but it was n't for a game of anything, so let's pin it therefore to curiosity), it's twenty-five years ago too, since I saw my last, in fact my only live game; nor have I any real sense of the mores of the game, or it's heroes and villains. Yet where I do stand on much firmer ground is that I know it's loved, enjoyed, debated, argued about, anguished over; that it's expressed poetically and absorbed romantically, strike after strike, pitch upon pitch.

That love comes out so achingly well in Bernard Malamud's "The Natural", or anything with a baseball inflection written by George Plimpton, and certainly W.P. Kinsella's "Field of Dreams". These have all in their own alchemical ways explained baseball to me, not just the sport, but as a state of mind, a metaphor. I've sweated in the dug-outs; worried about curve balls; felt the expectations of thousands of spectators hang over the last man going into bat; walked into the whirlwind of recriminations thrown up in the locker room; realised the passage of time once the glory days have gone and home is the minor league. Baseball is almost Homeric; man at odds with fate, the struggle against adversity: injury, accident, the perversity of chance, racking self doubt on one hand, with contempt and arrogance on the other. Magnificent and defiant.

I saw the London stage of the Tour de France yesterday; if there is another sport that offers itself so willingly to a similar palette of emotions, then it's cycling. It has to be. Just as many heroes, just as many compromised, tortured souls, enduring fresh agonies and bearing old wounds over thousands of aching miles There have to be stories. It is a century's old Odyssey: man, machine, and an indifferent, sometimes implacable Nature. Is there a French evocation of all of this as passionate as the American for baseball?