NICE, France – Probably too busy to be noticed, the 176 cyclists who will start the Tour de France this weekend will head to an expanding hospital where caretaker Maude Leneveu is still recovering from the livid months of treating COVID-19 patients and dying. .
After 12 hours of cleaning her basins, turning the sheets, feeding them and calming their fears, she would stop by to breastfeed her little girl.
“We’re all exhausted,” says Leneveu, 30.
As coronavirus infections resume in France and his hospital in the Mediterranean city of Nice prepares for a momentary wave of dreaded patients preparing respirators and other equipment, Leneveu suspects that she may soon be called to the front line of the coronavirus. That would ruin your hopes of taking a short vacation after the Tour left Nice on Monday and enters France after two days of racing around the city.
But she is not a fan of the race itself and, despite the dangers to the fitness of moving forward with the biggest cycling tour in the middle of the pandemic, Leneveu insists that the three-week Tour will have to continue, because “life will have to pass.”
“These are already difficult times and it will be very, very difficult to endure in the long run if, in the most sensible part of all this, we do not allow other people to escape through television, sometimes like this,” he said. “Many of my family members love it and would have felt very unhappy if it hadn’t been for a Tour de France, because it’s iconic.”
The fact that the Tour, delayed in July, has survived the fitness crisis that ended many other sporting occasions, demonstrates the emotional, political and economic weight accumulated throughout the race during its 117-year history, in France and beyond.
For the organizers of the race and the French government, the praise of effectively leading the Tour to Paris on 20 September will be a tough message: that the country is recovering after the first fatal wave of infections and is learning to do so with its epidemic that has claimed more than 30,500 s in France.
The threat is that so many runners are in poor health on the 3484-kilometer (2165-mile) odyssey that organizers are forced to disrupt. Not getting to Paris would lead to questions, already expressed through medical staff and others, about whether the race deserves never to have left Nice.
On the eve of the start, the city’s main network of public hospitals had only 10 patients hospitalized by COVID, all grouped into a single hospital. But infections across the country are on the rise, with 7,379 new cases reported On Friday, another new daily record since the country came out of the blockade in May.
Marine, a senior medical student at the city’s Pasteur Hospital, who will be on the Tour in the first two stages on Saturday and Sunday, said after completing his morning shift in the emergency room on Friday that the cyclists stayed at home. Because she did not have permission from the hospital government to speak to the media, she asked to be known only by her first name.
“That doesn’t seem very reasonable. Besides, we’re under pressure at the hospital right now. There are very few beds, so we are not provided to deal with a large influx of patients in poor health,” he said. “If there are more infections due to the Tour, it will be confusing for us to administerArray … It would have been better to cancel.”
But for cyclists, in a year that had been ruined with destabilized races and homeschooling on bikes tied to the desk, the Tour is a blessing, a valuable opportunity to get paychecks and, in all likelihood, new contracts through glitter on French roads.
“We all perceive that it is a fact that the race will end,” said Richie Porte, an Australian who takes his tenth Tour, for the Trek-Segafredo team. “But all the credits go to the organizers to start this race, because cycling wants this race to at least begin.”
It has not escaped the attention of the fitness staff than the bonus of 1,500 euros ($1785) that was paid to some of them through the government for their heroism at the height of the epidemic in France, when other people locked up throughout the country cheered them every and every one. At night from their windows, they are small potatoes compared to the costs that Tour cyclists can pay on the roads.
The winner of the Tour receives 500,000 euros ($595,000). The winners of the 21 stages take 11,000 euros. There is an additional diversity of smaller prizes, including: 1,500 euros to win one of the many sprints in the stages and 800 euros to rise first to the maximum sensitive of the most difficult climbs.
Leneveu said his net salary for 4 hours of 12-hour hospital paintings depending on the week was 1,450 euros ($1,725) depending on the month. She was one of those who won the COVID bonus after two months of treating patients. She said she had to carry plastic garbage bags over her blouses and two or three layers of family gloves in the first few weeks when good enough coverage was missing. She came here outside the jolgorio so exhausted and ex-resistant with the hatred she asked to move on to part-time paintings from September.
“It was like being armed with bayonets opposite cannons,” he says. “We lost the will to fight.”
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