This year’s Tour de France got under way in Spain on Saturday, 4 July, and, as in several previous years, the battle is between Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard. Unless one of them crashes or falls ill, the final outcome is not especially suspenseful. In addition, the world’s biggest sporting event has been overshadowed by the FIFA World Cup, so interest has declined somewhat.

But the Tour rolls on, and there are still stages, jerseys and other prizes to be won. On Tuesday, Norway’s “national team”, Uno-X Mobility, produced something of a sensation. Norwegian rider Torstein Træen joined the breakaway and secured cycling’s “holy grail”: the yellow leader’s jersey. So yes—a Norwegian is leading the entire Tour, and that has happened only three times before. It is an enormous prestige victory for Uno-X, with former cycling star Tor Hushovd serving as team manager.

Success has not come easily for Træen. He suffered from severe asthma as a child, and in 2022 he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Just one year later he made his Tour de France debut, so the road to the top has been long and difficult. But it says something about the athletes who compete in professional cycling. These are men who are not stopped by pain. They do not merely race each other—they race each other uphill, mile after mile. It is self-inflicted torture, hour after hour.

And pain is not the only danger they face. When you ride 180 kilometres a day in a tightly packed peloton at more than 40 km/h, sprint at 70 km/h and race downhill from mountains at 90 km/h protected only by a lightweight plastic helmet and thin Lycra, something will eventually go wrong. Every cyclist crashes sooner or later, making professional cycling one of the most dangerous and injury-prone sports in the world.

Norway dominates both football and cycling

A cycling team consists of eight riders, and Uno-X Mobility fields six Norwegians and two Danes, with the highly decorated Tobias Halland Johannessen serving as team captain. So why should you spend time watching 176 riders from 22 teams, often cycling for five or six hours at a stretch? Because cycling is the only team sport in which individuals also help one another across team boundaries. That creates an extraordinary number of tactical scenarios and moments of suspense.

Like football, it can seem painfully dull for long periods, but then, suddenly, something happens. We are now hoping that Uno-X Mobility can hold on to the yellow jersey for as long as possible—and perhaps claim a stage victory or two. The race concludes in Paris on 26 July.