TOUR DE FRANCE

Many of us are mesmerized at the moment by the Tour de France bike race. This is an annual feat of endurance, in which around 200 cyclists, in teams of 9, ride a race almost every day for 3 weeks. Nearly all the stages cover 100 miles or more. They ride over 7,000 foot passes, they do lung-bursting sprints and time-trials, they brave terrifying mountain descents at 60 mph, – all for the honor of wearing the coveted maillot jaune (yellow T-shirt) as winner on the final ride up the Champs Elysees in Paris this Sunday.
Behind the superhuman feats of endurance, and the drug scandals that have plagued the race in recent years, lie stories of hardship and self-discipline that are lessons of the spirit, in line with Paul’s talk of athletes in training in 1 Cor. 9:24-27. There are the riders who take risky ‘medications’, and get caught and expelled. There are the riders who take off like rockets, only to flame out and finish well behind.
There are also surprising lessons in Christian leadership. We have seen Mark Cavendish, a supreme sprinter and the reigning world road race champion, driving himself to support Bradley Wiggins, his team leader, knowing that the Tour contains too many mountain stages for him to have any hope of winning himself. We have seen Wiggins leading the riders in going slow to allow his chief rival, and last year’s winner, to catch up after getting 3 punctures. We have seen another team member, Chris Froome, sacrifice his own chances of winning to see Wiggins home – as he did in the Tour of Spain race last year. And we have seen Wiggins, now the almost certain winner, say that if the course favors Froome next year, as it well may, he will support him in turn.
All this speaks to me of the Son of Man, who “came not to be served, but to serve,” and “to learn obedience by his suffering,” and who left us an example of what servant leadership looks like. It reminds me of examples among the Celtic saints, like Boisil, believing (rightly) that he would shortly die of the plague, using the last week of his life to mentor the young Cuthbert, one of the greatest of Christian leaders. And, as Paul reminds us, “They do it to get a prize that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.”