ESPRIT DE CORPS

With the crickets humming in the furnace heat of Provence and the wine iced down in big pitchers, the colossal pageant, drama and ritual of summertime France can now begin again.

Starting today, and for the next three weeks, men, women and children by the millions--maybe as much as a third of this country’s population--will troop out to roadsides from Brittany to the Pyrenees, from Limousin to Champagne. Some will camp overnight in eager expectation. Others will bring picnic tables and packed lunches, and make a day of it.

They will be waiting for that sudden flash of color and chrome, that smooth whoosh! of rubber on pavement that signals the passing of the Tour de France.

More than a punishing bicycle race, the Tour lasts longer than any other game in the world--21 days this year. It has cloaked itself in commercial hucksterism and schlock, yet arguably remains the biggest free event in the world.

It is a sports contest, but it has been witness to death, doping, cheating and villainy as well as bravery, sportsmanship and triumph.

The late philosopher Roland Barthes judged the ordeal as the latter-day equal of the Homeric epics.

“As in ‘The Odyssey,’ this race is a voyage of both human endeavor and exploration to the far reaches of the land, every nook and corner,” Barthes found.

In its willful anachronism lies much of its appeal. On the threshold of the 21st century, men still compete against one other on mechanical contraptions whose origins are as old as the telegraph and steam locomotive. Like a baseball diamond, the Tour carries a reassuring eternity about it. Only the world wars have been able to stop it.

This Gallic spectacle that began in 1903--the year the Wright brothers pioneered manned flight and two Milwaukee mechanics named Harley and Davidson built their first motorcycle--had an American starring player last year, in what the official Tour record terms the “comeback of the century.”

The now celebrated Lance Armstrong, 28, of Austin, Texas, battled back from testicular cancer to finish first in what he describes without hesitation as “the hardest sporting event in the world.”

The exploit earned Armstrong a meeting at the White House with President Clinton. He became the first cyclist to have his picture put on boxes of Wheaties. He earned a fortune, maybe $10 million, in promotional fees. His autobiography is a New York Times bestseller.

The 5-foot-11, 165-pound Texan is back for this year’s Tour, riding to win once again at the head of the blue-clad team of nine fielded by the U.S. Postal Service. In the race’s first stage, the 180 starters from 20 teams will streak today at one-minute intervals over a 16.5-kilometer (10 1/4-mile) circuit at a theme park north of Poitiers, not far from where Charles Martel turned back an invading Arab army in 732.

Will Armstrong be wearing the overall victor’s yellow jersey when the Tour finishes on the cobblestones of the Champs-Elysees of Paris July 23? That is his ambition.

“Whenever I think about that, I realize that winning the first time for me wasn’t just a first-time victory in the Tour de France, it was a comeback from cancer,” a hale-looking and relaxed Armstrong said Thursday. “And if I compare repeating versus coming back from cancer and winning the first time, this should be a little bit easier.”

For many of the French, a second victory for the foreigner with the cropped hair and frank style of speaking would be a cruel disappointment--no Frenchman has won since Bernard Hinault in 1985.

Last year was especially humiliating: There was not a French winner in any of the one-day stages for the first time since 1926.

But in a deeper sense, who wins won’t really matter. For the Tour has come to play a mysterious role in the collective French consciousness. It is a bonding ritual on a national scale that draws in tens of millions with only a casual interest in the sport of cycling, or none at all.

As TV cameras mounted on motorcycles and in helicopters track the 3,630-kilometer (2,255.7-mile) race live, they will refresh and enrich the mental images the French carry around of their country’s history, landscape and beauty.

In the weeks to come, commentators will be reminding viewers that Carpentras is the “homeland of the truffle,” Mulhouse the birthplace of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly accused of treason, and thousands of other factoids.

People who may never leave their neighborhoods of Paris or Lyons will be whisked by the Tour, via TV, newspaper or Internet coverage (at https://www.letour.fr), to the pine-fringed mountains of the Vosges, or the vineyards of Gascony whose grapes are squeezed into Armagnac brandy.

The race, whose route varies every year, doesn’t occur in the confines of an arena; its venue is the land itself.

“The Tour has, without a doubt, done more for the national unity of France than any of the major events the country has witnessed in the 20th century,” Georges Conchon, an author and film producer, once claimed.

The race also provides endless fodder for philosophical debates. Not for the majority of the French the Lombardiesque obsession with winning as “the only thing.” The most popular native son ever to ride the Tour is the now retired Raymond Poulidor, a poor farm boy from Limousin who never won any of his 14 races.

Still, the French idolize “Poupou” because he never quit. Anybody with God-given talent can beat others, the popular reasoning seems to be, but it takes a person with exceptional guts to keep coming back, again and again, after he has been beaten.

Not that the French wouldn’t love for one of their own to be victorious.

In 1975, the eventual winner, Bernard Thevenet, had a positive drug test, records Graeme Fife, an English cyclist who published a recent history of the Tour. The lab results notwithstanding, says Fife, “the president of the French Republic was waiting on the Champs-Elysees to welcome home the first French winner in eight years.”

Henri Desgrange, the cycling fanatic and Paris newspaperman who inaugurated the race as a gimmick to sell more copies of his sports daily, once said the ideal Tour would be so demanding that only one rider would manage to stagger across the finish line. In the calculated inhumanity of the event lies much of its extraordinary appeal in France and beyond.

“No technology can increase the energy or willpower of the rider, nor can it lessen the doubts which sometimes overwhelm him,” Hinault, one of only four men to win the Tour five times, has said.

The race positively revels in its sadistic side. When riders in 1978 protested that the course was too grueling, organizer Jacques Goddet made no apologies.

“It is necessary to keep an inhuman side to the Tour; excess is necessary,” he said.

This year’s route--a day of hard climbing in the Pyrenees, three in the Alps--includes one of the most fearsome challenges of any Tour: the wind-swept, bleak lava fields of Mont Ventoux, 1,909 meters (6,263 feet) above sea level. On the day before Bastille Day, in what should be the full-bore swelter of mid-July, the racers will have to grind up the mountain at the end of a 149-kilometer (92-mile) ride.

“It is like another world up there, among the bare rocks and the glaring sun,” the late British cyclist Tom Simpson once said. “The white rocks reflect the heat and the dust rises, clinging to your arms, legs and face.”

In 1967, Simpson collapsed of heart failure and died on the monster peak in Provence, two miles from the finish. He had taken amphetamines to boost his performance. Over the years, three Tour participants have died during the race, the most recent Italian Olympic gold medalist Fabio Casartelli, in 1995, when he fell in the Pyrenees and split open his skull.

Two years ago, a doping scandal almost destroyed the Tour. This year, participants’ urine samples will be frozen until a test designed to detect erythropoietin, a substance that increases the number of oxygen-carrying red cells in the bloodstream, can be certified. Some longtime followers of the Tour are skeptical that organizers would dare invalidate race results months after the fact. But the threat is another, if belated, step by the Tour to counteract the reality or impression of widespread drug use by professional cyclists.

This year’s race will wind through 571 cities and towns and countless villages of France. There are also stages in Switzerland and Germany, nations where cycling is hugely popular. Already, the Tour claims to be the single most-watched sporting event in the world, after the Olympics.

In the final analysis, of course, it’s a bicycle race. In three weeks, it will have been won by an athlete whose legs have throttled up and down like pistons millions of times, who can shrug off the fatigue and despair that sidelines others when lactic acid floods muscles and lungs seem close to exploding in the thin mountain air.

It’s a race, but it’s also a vacation-time distraction and national pastime, wonderful television, a well-oiled organization that makes bundles of money and a great moving sales platform.

And, as Armstrong’s victory showed again last year, it can also quickly turn into a metaphor for life, for the triumph of courage and muscle over the most daunting of obstacles.

Desgrange, its founding father, found the Tour nothing less than “the best way of exciting wonder among the people of France, of encouraging emulation, energy, willpower on a wide scale.”

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Today through July 23. Today: Noon (delayed), Channel 7.