After My Husband Died, I Couldn’t Stop Watching the Tour de France

FIVE DAYS AFTER my husband died, I started watching the Tour de France.

It was the opening stage, 2013. The team buses had dropped their cyclists off at the start and headed toward the finish, 213 kilometres away. Disaster struck: a bus got stuck under the banner marking one kilometre to go. Organizers scrambled to figure out where to put a new finish line. Meanwhile, the riders were tearing through Corsica.

It was a flat stage, so everything was moving terrifically, terrifyingly fast. The sprinters were fighting for position at the front of the peloton. Some crashed. Then, the bus moved; someone had let the air out of the tires, and the vehicle squeaked underneath the banner. The finish line was open. Marcel Kittel, a handsome German sprinter with fantastic hair, took his first ever stage win at the Tour.

I watched, shell shocked and hypnotized. My husband, Spencer McLean, had been diagnosed with cancer only six weeks before that, at age thirty-six. At that moment, we were supposed to be packing up to move to California, where he was supposed to be starting a fellowship.

But things don’t go as they’re supposed to. Instead, I’d picked out a casket and a funeral dress and found remote helicopters for little kids to fly at the pub after his funeral service. I’d come up from all these widow tasks and sat alone in front of the television, watching people ride bikes.

Spencer loved cycling. He’d bought me a road bike as a wedding present. We’d dropped both our bikes off for servicing days before he got sick. By the time they were ready, I was the only one left to go pick them up.

I had never watched the Tour without him. I’d barely watched it with him. Now I watched it obsessively. I watched every stage that year. Some I watched twice—live in the morning when I got out of bed (I couldn’t sleep) and then again that night (I never slept). Throughout, I talked constantly to Spencer. I asked him about pelotons and echelons and whether he believed that this was really and finally a Tour without doping.

He would never answer me. But the Tour de France carried me through those first three weeks without him. I cried when British cyclist Chris Froome, all long limbs and knobby joints, won the yellow jersey and said that he’d have given anything to have his mother there. She’d died from cancer.

I’ve watched the Tour and its long-awaited sister, the Tour de France Femmes, devotedly ever since. I am now a walking encyclopedia of TDF facts. I am also the proud owner of a legit TDF yellow jersey, which I won from the Tour de France Femmes by entering a contest on Twitter. It’s signed by Marianne Vos, the GOAT of women’s cycling.

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The physicality required to complete a Tour is mind blowing—twenty-one stages over three weeks, many of them in the neighbourhood of 150 to 200 kilometres, and some with so much mountain elevation that a small car would struggle to make it to the top. There is almost always wind and rain and drunk spectators and a man who dresses like the devil and runs alongside the riders.

The main plot line is straightforward: Who will take home the yellow jersey? It’s the smaller plot lines that keep me captivated. It’s the fans who stand by the roadside—partying, cheering, shouting Allez! Allez! It’s Canadian Mike Woods, winning his first stage victory in 2023 in clouds atop one of the most mythic climbs in France, while my phone blew up with texts: Are you watching?

It’s Mark Cavendish breaking his collarbone and ending what most people thought was his last chance to break the record for the most stage wins ever; it’s Cavendish, at thirty-nine, achieving that dream the following year. It’s Justine Ghekiere coaching her teammate down a big scary descent, shouting, “Full gas!” It’s French rider Julien Bernard stopping mid-race to kiss his wife and toddler as the Tour wound through his hometown, for which he received a fine from the International Cycling Union.

It’s all of these moments, the things that aren’t supposed to happen.