Colm O'Regan: Getting out of the saddle and into the couch

Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane.

Could I just do nothing but watch sport for the summer? Would that be so wrong? No work, no walks, no self improvement.

Just the curtain drawn to keep the sun away and watch sport the old-fashioned way. On a telly with no connection to the internet. No choice. Just a ramble down a pre-ordained summer schedule of sport.

The well-trodden path of endless bored summers of yore. Kick off with a Euros or a World Cup. Three matches a day plus the highlights. 

Home and Away squeezed sullenly in somewhere at an odd time. Mr Fisher is not happy. 

Then into the French Open tennis, Wimbledon, a bit of rainy golf from some bleak North Sea strand in Britain, World Athletics, a random Sportsworld featuring elephants playing football, the Dublin Horse Show, the Olympics if they’re on in the Summer, all sprinkled with regular doses of GAA. All-Ireland minor semi-finals in Irish with Micheál O’Se commentating.

And one summer I just want to be laid up with a non-specific disease so I can recreate the classic 1986 to 199something summer: to devote three entire weeks to the king of them all, my cricket: the Tour De France.

I don’t know much about cycling now. My brain refuses to admit new entrants to the hall of fame. All I care about is teams named after 90-minute blank tapes, saying the word peloton with authority. and pretending not to know a huge dose of them were dosing themselves with all sorts.

Maybe it was more exotic then. To watch France for about 40 hours in a month. A French exchange without the travel or learning any of the language. Apart from words like “domestique” and “Tête de la course”.

But still the Tour De France was the best way to glimpse France beyond a late night Quare Film, or “les Francais adore le Piat d’Or”, or “ou est le centre de George Pompidou?”

My father would marvel at the condition of the roads. Not a pothole in sight. People lining the route because they don’t seem to have hedges in France. Them lads don’t mind who’s watching them.

It always made me nervous in the lowland stages, the lack of hedges. If a cow broke out somewhere in Dijon there’d be nothing to stop it getting to the Urals.

And of course the lunatics. The fellas who were the same age as my father but thought it a good idea to run along the road after bicycles while wearing only underpants like a dog with a kink.

And the menacing figures who challenged the slim leads of Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche. Laurent Fignon was always hanging around with his little glasses. Greg LeMond. Indurain lurking. The hoor. 

Small Columbian lads who were a divil for the hills. There was a turning point though in 1987 with Jimmy Magee saying that Pedro Delgado must know “the game is up”

1987 was when it all came together. Before Olé Olé there was Stephen Roche and Calvita cheese. 

Different times when the most luxurious product the biggest sports star in the country would be asked to endorse was school lunch filler. He’d have a strategic partnership with Goldman Sachs Saudi Arabia now.

I wasn’t the only one enraptured. Anyone on a bicycle was liable to launch an attack from the peleton while on the way to the shop. 

A group of children just be cycling along a country road at a normal pace. And then one would be out of the saddle of the Raleigh Triumph crossing the finishing line at the bad corner. Ready to get the yellow jumper and a bouquet from a lovely girl.

The Tour De France is on TG4 from Saturday. Out of nowhere I have a sudden hunger for Calvita.