Pandemic Tour de’ France, a Big Ask for Health Workers
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After
her 12-hour days of cleaning their bedpans, changing the sheets, feeding them and
trying to calm their fears, she’d then go home to breastfeed her baby daughter.
“We are all exhausted”, the 30-year-old, Leneveu says.
With Coronavirus infections picking up
again across France and her hospital in the Mediterranean city of Nice preparing
for a feared second wave of patients by readying respirators and other gear,
Leneveu suspects she might soon be called back to the coronavirus front lines.
That would ruin her hopes of taking a short holiday after the Tour leaves Nice
on Monday and heads deeper into France, after two days of racing around the
city. But while no fan of the race herself, and despite the health risks of
pushing ahead with cycling’s greatest road show in the midst of the pandemic,
Leneveu is adamant that the three-week Tour must go on, because life must
continue.
“These are already tough times and it
will be very, very hard to endure over the long term if, on top of all this, we
don’t allow people to escape via the television, with events like this,” she
said. “Many of my family members adore it and they would have been very sad if
there’d been no Tour de France, because it’s emblematic”. That the Tour,
delayed from July, survived the health crisis that wiped out scores of other
sporting events testifies to the emotional, political and economic clout
steadily accumulated by the race during its 117-year history, both in France
and beyond.
For race organizers and the French
government, the reward of successfully steering the Tour to the finish in Paris
on Sept. 20 will be a striking message — that the country is getting back on
its feet after the first deadly wave of infections and learning to live with
its epidemic that has claimed more than 30,500 lives in France. The risk is
that so many riders might fall sick during the 3,484-kilometer (2,165-mile)
odyssey that organizers are forced to cut it short. Not reaching Paris would
lead to questions, already being voiced by medical personnel and others, about
whether the race should never have set off from Nice at all.
(Courtesy:
AP)
