If bicycle track-races are lyric poems, and the one-day classics achingly significant short stories, then the grand Tours are triple-decker Victorian novels: sprawling, unpredictable, and filled with slightly artificial plot twists. Unlike football or tennis, sports that take place on standardised fields of play, cycling takes place in the real world. Its verisimilitude is its virtue: it celebrates the actual. - from Cyclogeography by Jon Day