The Tour de France is not just a bike race. It is a traveling circus, a moving theater through one of the most geographically diverse countries in the world, and this episode captures both ends of that spectrum: the quiet, often forgotten heart of rural France, and its most mythic mountain: Mont Ventoux.
Host Molly Hurford and inGamba creative director James Startt are joined first by Ed Pickering, editor-at-large on our recent issue of The Magazine and author of the Substack “Cycling, the Universe and Everything,” for a conversation about La France Profonde, the deep rural interior that the Tour passes through every year between its famous mountain stages. Ed and James, between them covering more than 50 Tours on the ground, make the case that these overlooked flatlands and rolling farmlands are not filler but the true soul of the race: more cows than people, cassoulet in summer heat, and roads suspended in time.
Then Eros Poli, former winner of the Mont Ventoux Tour stage, joins to talk about the mountain that changed his life. His 1994 solo stage win atop Mont Ventoux in blistering heat with no team car support and a can of warm Fanta as his only mid-climb rescue, remains one of the most improbable and beloved moments in Tour de France history. That win, documented in the film Grinta, is now being celebrated at film festivals around the world. Eros shares what the Ventoux demands of anyone who attempts it, and what the Tour de France Femmes riders can expect when they race to its summit for the first time this year.
In this episode:
- What is La France Profonde? Ed and James define the “empty diagonal” that sits at the heart of every Tour
- Why bike racing needs wide open space, and why France has it
- The best things to eat in rural France (cassoulet wins, narrowly)
- Eros on his 1994 Ventoux stage win: the heat, the solo attack, the warm Fanta, and the bow to the crowd
- His advice for riders climbing Ventoux: “The grinta is inside you. You cannot get it from your watch.”
Craving France in real life? inGamba’s 2027 France expansion adds the Burgundy region to our trip list, and our Provence trip runs regularly. Find our France trips here.
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